


Love Like Ghosts

by Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bring Ben Back 2020, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, Force Ghost Sex, Force Ghost(s), Happy Ending, How Did I Forget To Tag The, Loss of Virginity, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rebels Cameos, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Tears First, Then Joy, World Between Worlds, Wow How Is That Last One Not a Tag Yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:01:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21928627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
Summary: For Jeeno, who let me squeeze her through the whole movie.***Tatooine is cold at night.  Jakku was a desert, but the sands of her homeworld somehow clutched the day’s heat until the next sunrise. She has nothing she can burn to make a fire, so Rey abandons her camp in the central courtyard of the Lars farm halfway through the first night and curls into the atmospherically-controlled cockpit of the X-wing.  It isn’t really built to accommodate a sleeper. The seat only reclines 80 degrees. The controls jab her in the kidneys as she gets a few hours’ restless sleep, but it’s better than freezing to death under the watchful gaze of the Skywalker ghosts.After three days, she draws a line on the wall with a charred bone.It’s never taken Ben very long to find her.  He’ll be along soon enough.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 345
Kudos: 960
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	1. They Sing All Day And They Haunt Me in The Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jeeno2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeeno2/gifts).



> As a preface, I should explain my view of canon, which is fundamentally Jewish. 
> 
> A story. 
> 
> A group of rabbis were arguing about a very arcane point of law. Basically, whether a particular oven was kosher or not. Rabbi Eliezer was the big man on campus in those days, and he announced his opinion. The oven was no good. He had a lot of thoughts about why. He cited exhaustive authority for his position.
> 
> Nonetheless, the other sages disagreed. They voted go on the oven. Not one to back down, Rabbi Eliezer summoned three different miracles-he made the water flow backwards, etc. etc.- to support himself as the authority on all things, oven-related or no. Each time, the sages voted, and it was thumbs up on the oven. Finally, Rabbi Eliezer summoned the voice of G-d himself, who said, "Why are you differing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the halakha [the law] is in accordance with his opinion in every place that he expresses an opinion?" 
> 
> This still failed to impress the other rabbis, who were very tart when they told G-d that he'd given them the Torah and they could figure the rest of it out themselves, kaythanxbai. The oven was approved.
> 
> What was G-d's response? 
> 
> He smiled. He said, "My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me." 
> 
> It was a good day.
> 
> (Later, they sorted out the oven business, don't worry, we're all okay).
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> This is a long way of saying that I can't just put the canon out with the trash. It happened. That movie was really in the theaters. Ben Solo really did get his first kiss and promptly pass from the world. 
> 
> But like the rabbis said, "It is not in Heaven." The movie is on earth. We can vote on what it means. And if the majority of us agree, we can overrule the creator's interpretation. 
> 
> Death isn't the end in Star Wars. It's usually not even death. Ben's coming back. And because this is a Shepard fic, they're gonna bang.

_Yes I know that love is like ghosts_

_Oh, few have seen it, but everybody talks_

_Spirits follow everywhere I go_

_Oh they sing all day and they haunt me in the night_

_Oh they sing all day and they haunt me in the night_

_-Lord Huron_

When Ben vanishes from her arms, Rey doesn’t panic. Their bond is still buzzing in the back of her head, after all, as strong as it’s ever been. Stronger. They are one. Two halves of the same soul. 

There’s a lurch in her stomach, like a missed stair step. That’s all. She catches herself. Ben is with her, as he’s been for the past year—for her entire life—and her first kiss is still cooling on her lips. There are other things to think about besides the fact that Ben has vanished—temporarily!—and has left his clothes behind. Ben is somewhere else, likely _naked_ (a thought for another time)—but he is alive, and he loves her. She knows this like she knows the air in her lungs and the beat of her own heart. 

The ceiling is coming down. She will think about it when she is safe. 

Her flight takes her past a tank of Snokelets and a pile of vaguely familiar body parts. She resolves, in a thought that flutters out like a startled bird, that she will one day have a talk about her feelings with Ben in a room that nobody has died in. 

The walls are collapsing in, as though the Sith eschewed mortar in favor of holding their temple together with spite and the Force only. 

Her next stab of disquiet comes when she sees the unfamiliar spaceship parked next to Luke’s old X-wing at the landing strip. Some part of her had wondered whether Ben had even been there on Exegol in the flesh or whether he was just projecting from Kef Bir, where she’d stranded him with no ship. But of course he wasn’t. He couldn’t have fought all those Knights of Ren while Force-projecting. It would have ki—

No. One foot in front of the other. Ben’s presence is still bright and loving in the part of her mind she has set aside for their bond.

She looks around her. There is nothing but dust and destruction in view. This planet and everyone who lived on it is dead. Wherever Ben is, he’s not nearby. 

Still, even though Luke’s X-wing is covered in rust and barnacles, she leaves in it, rather than Ben’s small go-fast. Ben might come back to Exegol, he might— 

Another touch to the bond. Another hum of reassurance. Ben’s not afraid or hurt, wherever he is. She can focus on making it back to Ajan Kloss. She piles Ben’s clothes and Luke’s lightsaber in the gunner’s seat. She shakes her head. Naked. He had better not be on Kef Bir, he’ll catch his death of cold. 

The thought isn’t as funny as it should be. 

Burning spaceships fill the sky like falling stars. Rey leaves Exegol. For reasons she can’t explain, she looks back as she goes.

* * *

“Ben Solo?” Rose asks, incredulous. “I never even knew that Leia had a son, I never—“

“It was Palpatine,” Rey tells them. “He was after Ben his entire life. Leia tried to protect him by sending him to Luke, but it didn’t work.” Rey has tried to explain the Emperor, Snoke, the Sith, but all her stories lead back to Ben. 

Rose lets out a long breath, and Poe gives her a tight smile, but Finn is a harder nut to crack. 

“We’re still fighting the First Order as of _this morning_ , Rey,” he reminds her. He’s known Ben longer than she has, and in far less favorable circumstances. He’s not ready to forgive him. 

“And Ben isn’t with them,” she tells him sharply. She can’t tell whether Ben’s awake or asleep, but she knows he’s not fighting. 

Poe clears his throat. “The leadership is all gone, then,” he says. 

Rey nods. 

Poe stands up off the box of blank hydropanners and dusts his suede pants. “We need to focus on securing the hyperspace lanes,” he says. “We can worry about stragglers and defectors from the First Order if they show up.”

“He won’t come here,” Rey tells them, and it is equal parts reassurance and warning. “I’m leaving. He’ll find me.”

“You’re always leaving,” Finn says, and the little smile he gives her takes the sting out of it. 

Rose is less concerned about her feelings. “You can’t go. We just lost Leia. We need to show the galaxy that we’re in control, we need to show the Jedi are back, we—”

“I’m not a Jedi,” Rey interrupts. 

Rose and Finn both frown at her now. 

“Just because you’re not finished with your training?” Finn asks after a long pause. “I think after you smoke two different darksiders plus all their backup guys, you can call yourself whatever you want.”

Rey shifts uncomfortably. “No, I don’t think...I don’t think a Jedi is the right thing to call me. I’m not--I mean, Ben and I aren’t--we don’t fit. Into the Jedi teachings.”

Finn’s eyes further narrow at the linkage of their names. 

“You’re the closest thing we have, then. You saved us, Rey! All of us! The whole damn galaxy,” Finn tells her, taking her hand. 

Rey takes it back. “That was Lando Calrissian and you and Jannah and Poe and—look, it’s not like you’ll need me around to lift a bunch of rocks.”

He stares at her stubbornly. 

“...or if you do, maybe you’ll lift them yourself, right?”

He closes his eyes and tilts his head back. “Rey...” he starts again. Then he closes his mouth and looks to Poe for support. 

Poe clears his throat. “It’s more important than ever that we push forward while we have the advantage. We need to show continuity of command.”

Even Rose rolls her eyes at that. 

Rey nods as though she’s taking his thoughts into account, while mentally running through her pre-flight checklist. 

“Right then,” Poe says, always acutely aware of when women are preparing to disregard his wishes. “So, can I assign you to the Chandrila clean-up team? There are a lot of—“

“Nope,” Rey says, standing up. “No thank you.” 

She hears Rose smother a giggle.

Poe is taken aback. “This isn’t the time for you to go chasing off after Ren—“ 

“Ben.”

“… _Ben,_ the guy who has been stalking you for the past year, I’m sure he’s on his way right now, all tight pants and trembling lips…”

“ _Gross_ ,” Finn mutters. 

“…and meanwhile you can finish this war like Leia would have wanted!” Poe ends. 

It’s a low blow, and Poe knows it. He sucks on his teeth while Rey glares at him. 

“I’m leaving,” she says shortly. “I’ll come back once Ben and I figure out what’s next. For the Jedi. The darksiders. All of us.” 

Poe takes a step to put himself between her and the exit of the cargo bay. Finn covers his face in his hands. He doesn’t want to watch. 

“ _After_ we have control of the main hyperspace lanes,” Poe tells her.

Rey lifts her eyebrows at him. “And you and what Sith army propose to stop me, exactly?”

They hold gazes for a fraught moment. Rey stands as still as a statue. She doesn’t want to knock him out and tell Finn to sit on him until she’s gone, but she’ll do it if she has to. 

He’s the first one to budge. He makes a sound of disgust, and Rey sidesteps him to head back toward Luke’s x-wing. It’s probably got another flight left in it, and Rey doesn’t want to leave the Resistance short. There are always fewer ships returning—and fewer pilots—than they hope. 

“Wait,” Poe calls from behind her in a grudging tone. She turns back. 

“Take BB-8 with you,” he sighs. “That antique you’re flying is liable to fall apart while you’re halfway through hyperspace, otherwise.”

* * *

Tatooine is cold at night. Jakku was a desert, but the sands of her homeworld somehow clutched the day’s heat until the next sunrise. She has nothing she can burn to make a fire, so Rey abandons her camp in the central courtyard of the Lars farm halfway through the first night and curls into the atmospherically-controlled cockpit of the X-wing. It isn’t really built to accommodate a sleeper. The seat only reclines about 80 degrees. The controls jab her in the kidneys as she gets a few hours’ restless sleep, but it’s better than freezing to death under the watchful gaze of the Skywalker ghosts. 

She hopes Ben’s keeping warm. She wonders whether she should have gone to Kef Bir instead. But surely he wouldn’t look for her there. He knows she needs to say goodbye to Leia, Luke, all the Jedi who came before her and died fighting her battle. 

It’s never taken him very long to find her. He’ll be along soon enough.

The next day, Rey gets to work unearthing what remains of the Lars moisture farming operation. She might be there for a few days, and she doesn’t think she has enough water for more than a couple more. She could leave a note for Ben, but she doesn’t want to risk missing him in the time it would take for her to run over to Mos Eisley or one of the other towns to pick up supplies. She wants to be there when he lands.

So she and BB-8 get to work wresting the machinery of life from the desert’s gullet, and by the end of the day, she has one of the moisture vaporators spitting out a rusty trickle of water into her canteen, and a sputtering, shorting pile of spare parts that together emit enough heat to keep her warm that night in a soft bed of sand. 

The next day, she and BB-8 start disassembling the X-wing, cleaning and repairing as they go. X-wings are fantastic ships; they all but fly themselves, even after a ten-year soak in the seas of Ahch-To. Still, she feels better once she’s pulled all the rotting seaweed out of every intake valve and confirmed the compressor connections. 

It’s good, hard work, the kind her mind and muscles have longed for over months spent training to lift rocks and block blaster bolts. BB-8 is a good partner, and she finds herself whistling a tune popular in the mess halls as he passes her tools and solders bolts. 

Rey always knows exactly how much food she has, but she recounts her rations that night, the stars blocked by the glow of her new heater. Three more days, four if she stretches them. Ben will come. He’s not scared. He’s likely looking for her in a methodical way. Rey read the Resistance training manuals while she was bored; when a team splits up, one has to stay put while the other runs a search grid. Ben’s always been the one to find her before. He’ll understand that she’s staying put while he tracks her down. 

It takes two more days to check every part on the X-wing. She even cleans it once she’s done, using a little excess from the vaporator to wash the windows clean. The sun is three finger-breadths above the horizon when she’s done, and BB-8 chirps at her inquisitively. Rey looks off at the horizon. There isn’t enough time to get to Mos Eisley, buy supplies, and be back before sunset. She’s not sure what it is about sunset, exactly, but she doesn’t want to be gone when it happens. 

So instead she hikes half a klick past the next dune and ruins the year of a local pack of womp rats. BB-8’s chirps are especially judgmental when she sears the thigh meat of their leader in the port-side engine of the X-wing fighter. She’s never eaten womp rat before, but she remembers from Jakku that the worse the diet of her kill, the hotter it needs to be cooked to burn out the flavor of scavenger. It’s still terrible, tooth-jarring starvation food, but it will stretch her rations a few days farther.

The next day she draws a line on the wall with a charred bone. 

* * *

She has five working vaporators by the time the womp rat jerky runs out. She doesn’t have enough containers to fill with the harvest. It pains her to see the water run uselessly down to the sand. So she has a bath—not just her typical sweat-and-scrape desert cleansing, but a real, green-world soak in a container that once held solar tiles. Then she washes her clothes and exposes her naked body to the rays of the setting sun while she and her trousers give up the bounty of their moisture to the desert winds. 

“Don’t look,” she tells BB-8. “I’m very sexy. I’d fry your processing cells.”

It beeps in confusion. 

Rey entertains the momentary fantasy that Ben will choose this exact moment to appear, parachuting out of a hot-wired TIE fighter or stepping directly through the Force to her location. 

_Oh, hello,_ she’ll say. _Yes, I do this all the time. This is my life now. I just lay around naked, looking this good, waiting for something exciting to happen._

Her stomach growls, and she looks down at it in reproach. It’s already dipping below her ropy ribcage. It’s not a problem. She’s eaten well in the Resistance: better than she ever did on Jakku, that’s for sure. A whole portion a day, without fail. She has more than enough water. She can go several days without food and never miss it. 

She and her clothes are both dry by the time night sends the temperatures plummeting. But she still shivers. Reluctantly, she climbs into the x-wing and retrieves Ben’s clothes. She pulls his jumper over her whites. It smells like blood and dust and sweat. It’s sharp and musky in her nostrils. She really ought to wash it. Mend it, at least. She could make it nice for him by the time he gets there. But she rubs her cheek against the collar of the jumper. It smells like Ben. She trudges back to the hollow where she sleeps. Stares up at the lines on the wall. BB-8 rolls very close to her. It doesn’t think very highly of her course of action. 

“Waiting is not _doing nothing_ ,” she says. “It’s an activity, waiting. You wait because you know someone is coming. It’s the most productive thing you can do, sometimes.” 

BB-8 isn’t known for patience, but it acquiesces to her request. 

It’s a good thing she has more water than she can drink, because she feels a little on her cheeks. Ben’s still strong in her mind, but he’s a little worried. What can make Ben worried, when they survived all the Sith together? It’s enough to make her worried too.

* * *

“Time for some renovations, I guess,” she tells BB-8 the next morning. She steps around the outside of the farm, marking the perimeter. If it’s to be made functional again, it needs a perimeter wall to ward off the vermin who will raid the farm for drops of moisture once the evaporators are working in number again. 

“Lifting rocks,” she sighs. BB-8 whistles in flat disapproval. “I’m fine,” she retorts. “Can lift rocks all day if I have to.” 

She lifts the first stone into place with the Force. It’s oddly heavy. She has lifted an entire spaceship, shouldn’t this be easy? Why does she feel so weak? The stone slips loose from the sand, trembles...drops. Sand shifts down the hill. She swears at it. Building this wall will take days. Weeks. Surely Ben will have arrived before it's done, and she hates to leave a task unfinished. 

“What are you _doing_ here?” a familiar voice demands from behind her. She spins, her throat seizing closed for reasons that have nothing to do with the powdery air. 

He’s lovely and flawless to her eyes, his face clear both of scars and the wounds of their last battle. Ridiculously solid in the desert haze, wearing the unrelieved black that is never restful against any backdrop, much less Tatooine’s dunes. 

“Ben,” she breathes, wasteful tears welling in her eyes. His arms are crossed over his chest, and his expression is best described as grumpy. It’s utterly familiar to her. 

She doesn’t notice, in the moment, the small hole in his jumper. She doesn’t note the lack of a ship for him to arrive in. She doesn’t register the way the wind fails to catch his long, clean curls. She only goes to him. 

She doesn’t only go, she runs. Her boots slip in the sand as she runs up the rise towards her Ben. He’s standing in front of the suns. 

She doesn’t notice his expression change. She doesn’t realize there should be a shadow. 

She reaches him, and she reaches for him. She reaches out—

For her hand to pass right through him.

She stops short, and her legs barely hold her.

Her hand is where his heart should be.

“No,” she says. “Oh no. No no no.” 

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he says. “I thought you knew.” 


	2. I Sing All Day and I Love You Through The Night

_ Yes I know that love is like ghosts _

_ Oh and what ain't living can never really die _

_ You don't want me, baby please don't lie _

_ Oh but if you're leaving, I gotta know why _

_ I said if you're leaving, I gotta know why _

_ Oh I sing all day and I love you through the night _

_-Lord Huron_  
  


She loses time. Maybe minutes, maybe only a few seconds. It gradually dawns on her that the sound in her ears is her own voice. She is crying.

She strikes out at him. She has no weapon, but she flails at him with bare hands, sending them through his chest as though he is smoke to be dissipated or a vision to be warded off. She closes her eyes so that she doesn’t have to look at his small, puzzled frown. The last time she saw him, he was smiling. He was–

Something seizes her wrists. 

Rey opens her eyes again, and Ben has his hands wrapped around her wrists, trapping them between their bodies. His mouth has dropped open, and his teeth are clenched. His grip is painfully hard.

Rey hopes it leaves a bruise. 

Together, they look down at their hands. Ben releases her, moving back half a step. Rey follows, rubbing the sting away from her wrists. 

“No,” she says again. She rushes near to him again, this time lifting her hands to cup his face. Desperately, she presses her mouth to his. He’s solid under her grasping fingers, and she digs them in as she opens her lips. 

It’s almost perfect. She can feel his hair brush her knuckles. She can feel his breath on her mouth. But when she bites down on his lower lip, she tastes nothing. She pushes him away and he staggers back, holding his hand over his face. 

They watch each other warily, chests heaving as though they’d fought with lightsabers. 

“What are you?” Rey grits out. 

She watches the muscles of his throat pulse as he swallows. “Ben Solo,” he says.

She shakes her head. “Are you like…” she looks at the dune where she last saw the Skywalker twins. “Like Luke?” The corners of his mouth flatten. “Like your mother?” she amends.

“Yes,” he says. 

She looks at him. He doesn’t cast a shadow, but his outline is clear and crisp. More than that, she can  _ feel _ him. His grief for her. His confusion. The impression his lips left on hers. 

“No,” she says, and it’s less a negation this time than an argument. 

Ben’s guarded stance relaxes a little bit now that she’s no longer shrieking at him or lunging for his throat. 

“Where have you been, then?” she asks. 

“With you,” he says, brown eyes wide and convincing. She scoffs. 

“No, really,” he says. “Not watching...not always, anyway. But I knew you were fine. Until you weren’t. I’ve been with you the entire time.” 

“I wasn’t fine!” she yells, feeling a stab of guilt when he flinches, then takes herself back in hand. “I wasn’t fine. I was waiting for  _ you _ .”

She waits for him to point out her endless capacity for self-deception, but Ben is gentler now than he had been, so he only shuffles closer to her and slowly draws her into an embrace, tucking her under his chin when she doesn’t resist. His arms curl all the way around her ribcage.

He forgets the heartbeat, but she’ll take it. 

* * *

Her stomach is now knotting against her spine, and Ben can sense it. He chivvies her into the X-wing, and she watches him like a ripper-raptor until he gingerly climbs into the gunner’s seat. She needs to buy supplies in Tosche Station, and it’s too far to walk in a day. 

“I’ll stay with you,” he tells her softly. “You don’t have to be worried I’ll vanish. I could just meet you there.” 

She juts out her lower lip at him and after a slight stand-off, he mutters a reluctant acquiescence. 

The sands are bare between the Lars homestead and Tosche Station. She came in via Mos Eisley, but the way is easy enough to find. The area has not prospered since the fall of the Empire, and a trail of junked out heaps mark the way in and out of the small power hub. Her ship is the only one equipped for any kind of combat, so she parks it well away from the first occupied hovel. 

She jumps when Ben’s large form fills her peripheral vision. She can’t hear him coming. She can’t sense his body in the Force. His feelings—oh, how he feels. She vibrates with it. But his physical presence needs a little work. 

“You could make a little noise to let me know you’re coming,” she says. 

“Yes, I could,” he agrees.

She stops on the edge of town and looks up at him. She wrinkles her nose. He very slowly tilts his face down to her, and just as slowly lifts the corners of his mouth.

Ben Solo might be dead but he’s still an ass, sometimes. 

She takes another step towards the station. As silently as a loth-cat, Ben walks with her, his feet not disturbing the sand. 

“Will anyone else be able to see you?” she asks. He shrugs as though he doesn’t really care.

“If I talk to you, they’ll think I’m crazy,” she points out.

“You coming in out of the dunes from a moisture farm that’s been cursed and abandoned for more than thirty years isn’t proof enough of that?” 

She bares her teeth at him, and he makes a noise that might approximate a laugh.

Some people went sand-mad in Jakku. She’d see them in town; they spoke to themselves, or did not speak at all. Once, a man took off his clothes at midday and walked toward the sun. She saw his bones, from time to time. 

While all her awareness is trapped on Ben’s shape, it is hard for her to imagine the perspective of Tosche Station’s few inhabitants. But she tries not to speak to him or to reach for his hand as they browse the stalls of meager provisions. Rey is unremarkable in her desert robes and scavenger’s staff; best it remain that way. 

She loads her sack with protein powder and carbohydrate paste: the same familiar stuff she’s eaten her entire life. Ben looks over her shoulder and scoffs. At the next stall, a hairy melon lifts off a pile and floats, untouched, to her arms. 

“You’ll get sick if that’s all you eat. You need fruit and veg,” he scolds her. The melon drops into her bag. 

Rey retrieves it and puts the melon back. “I’m not rolling in credits, you know,” she tells him. “I don’t know how long we’ll be here. I need to buy water tanks and maybe a speeder.”

“I’m rich, I think,” he tells her. “I could buy and sell this entire world, if I got you access to a real credit bank.” 

“Good for you,” Rey says absently. They have a vitamin slurry here, but it’s a different color from what they sold on Jakku, and Rey can’t tell if it’s for humans or not. 

The melon floats back to her, and this time the tired ssi-ruuk attendant at the fruit stall shouts in fear. 

Rey catches the melon and scans to see who else might have been watching. An older human woman makes the sign against evil and backs away from her. 

“Cut it out,” Rey hisses under her breath. 

“Why?” Ben asks. 

“Because I’m going to be selling water to these people, and I can’t do that if they think I’m some kind of Force witch,” Rey says through her gritted teeth as she pretends to examine the vitamin powders. 

Ben is quiet for a few moments. 

“So you’re going to stay on this shithole?” 

“For the time being.” The market is clearing out. Sand-mad is one thing, but a sand-mad witch...they aren’t taking any chances on Rey. The entire place is deserted within seconds. 

“What about the Resistance? All those friends of yours?”

Rey leaves a pile of credits on the rail of the stall she takes the vitamin powder from and turns to look at Ben. 

“They’ve never once asked me what I think they should do, and I don’t expect they’ll start now. I have nothing at all that needs doing right now, except fixing this.”

Ben arches an eyebrow. A small circle of white flesh winks at her through the hole in his sweater before he crosses his arms to cover it.

“You already fixed me,” he says.

Rey doesn’t respond immediately. She carries her purchases back to her ship. She doesn’t have enough credits for a speeder, but if she sells the water she has already harvested, she thinks it will be enough. A few more days. 

She piles the empty water casks into the gunner’s seat. Ben pauses, then sits down anyway. His form blurs around the tanks. He doesn’t occupy any space now.

Rey closes her eyes as her stomach gives a great lurch of nausea. 

“Maybe it’s my turn to be the broken one, then,” she whispers.

* * *

Carbohydrate loaf and protein slurry is a modest meal, but a familiar one, and one that takes some time to prepare. It’ll rip her insides to shreds if she doesn’t soak it long enough, so she places it on top of her space heater and sets to work cleaning house. She pulls the gunner’s side parachute out of the X-wing and folds it into something like a mattress in the hollow where she has been sleeping. She sweeps sand away from her cooking area. She washes her hands and face with a little water, then sets the collection tanks out to catch the vaporators’ nighttime production. 

Her long-honed instincts tell her the precise moment that her dinner is ready to eat, and she swoops down upon it, scooping it into her mouth with two practiced fingers. Halfway through, she remembers her manners.

“Ben, do you want some?” 

She’s not sure if Force ghosts can eat, but it would be rude not to offer. 

Ben doesn’t answer. She lifts her head and scans the room. He’s not there. 

“Ben?” 

She tries calling his name louder. She has three rooms cleared out, plus the vaporators and the landing strip, and-

“Ben?!” 

Her voice is taking on an edge of hysteria she doesn’t like. Their bond hasn’t changed, but it didn’t, did it, back on Exegol, and now—

His hands cup her shoulders from behind, and she whirls, screeching like a Bloggin-oil vendor. 

Ben is nonplussed at her wide eyes and heaving chest, frowning down at her in puzzlement.

She smacks at his chest again, and this time her hand bounces off.

“Where did you  _ go _ ?” she yells at him. 

“All you were doing was—”

“You can’t just go! You can’t just come and go, where I don’t know if you’re gone for good, and I don’t know…” She takes back control of herself. Ben gave her his very life, and she’s been acting like a jilted bride. She bites the inside of her lower lip as her jaw vibrates from the stress of it. 

“I’m always with you,” Ben says, in a softer voice. He’s not trying to soothe her; he knows that would just make her angry. “Even if you can’t see me.”

“It’s not enough,” she croaks out. 

He’s silent while he thinks about how much he can promise. “Then I’ll be here like this. As long as you need me.” His tone says that he doesn’t expect that will be very long.

“Is it hard to...be with me?” she asks, dreading the answer.

He shakes his head. 

So she buries her face in the hollow of his throat, grips the fabric over the muscles of his arms. Her blood is boiling with the need to do something. Fight. Kill. 

Instead she tugs him over to her bed. 

“Hold me,” she begs him. 

She pulls him down over her. 

They’re both so awkward about it. They don’t have a good sense of where to put arms and legs, and she can tell that Ben is working twice as hard to ensure that none of his limbs intersect with her own. But she manages to get him arrayed on top of her, lips soft against her own and his hair tangling under her grasping fingers. 

“Let me feel it,” she tells him.

“What?” he gasps, and it’s gratifying that he seems affected by this, at least, that when her tongue curls along his own he shakes and grips her more tightly.

“Your weight.” He’s not even supporting himself on his elbows, and he’s nearly twice as big as she is. She should be able to feel it. 

He pulls his face back away from hers and the corners of his eyes crinkle as he looks down at her. “I’ll crush you,” he points out.

“I don’t care,” she says, tugging him back to her. “I want to feel it.” She wants his weight on her. She wants to suffocate under it. She wants him to be heavier than she can bear. 

After a hesitation, he moves over her and his hips pin her down. She spreads her thighs to cradle his body. Ben’s lips land on her mouth, her eyelids, her cheeks...but they do not stray. She feels no such limitations. Rey lets her hands be greedy. 

“Can you take this off?” she asks, rubbing her knuckles against the silky skin of his stomach and tugging on the bottom hem of his jumper. 

She gets the merest flash of teeth from his smile. “I can look however I want to.” 

“Look naked, then,” she instructs him before stiffening at the horrible thought that he might must just vanish all of his clothes at once. 

Luckily, he either mistakes her sudden apprehension as shyness or he catches the thought, because he makes a little show out of it. He goes onto his knees to jerk the sweater over his head, revealing great tracts of unmarked, pale skin. He tosses it aside, and she doesn’t hear it land. He meets her eyes again as his hands go to the catches of his trousers. 

Her hands cover his and take over. He slides his trousers over his hips and away as she undoes his buttons and wraps one hand around him. He’s soft over steel here, hidden topography she never had the chance to uncover. They both watch her hand as she slides it tentatively from root to tip. 

“Can you feel this?” she suddenly asks. The ancient Jedi eschewed passion, and the Sith renounced their loves; nothing in either tradition has prepared them for the consequences of this dyad, sundered by Ben’s death. 

Ben brushes her cheek with one thumb. “I can feel whatever you feel.” 

“Oh.” She ponders the implications of that statement. There’s really no reason to be stroking him. It’s gratifying for neither of them, beyond the soothing pleasure of contact with her lover. She pulls her hand away. 

Then she reaches for the ties of her own clothing. “Better make it good for me, then.” 

This startles a laugh from Ben, as real and vibrant as though the sound had physically emerged from his throat. 

“I’ll try, sweetheart,” he vows, helping her slide her leggings away. He gingerly lays his body over hers, remembering to flex his arms to support his broad chest above her. “I never did this, you know.” 

He doesn’t move while they both absorb that simple preterite. There was a time when Ben did things. He fought, and he murdered, and he loved, and he kissed her. And now? 

“I never did either,” Rey says, and she hooks a leg over the back of his calf to pull him against her. 

She feels him hard against her stomach as he bends his head and sucks on her collarbone, the tip of a breast. And as good at that feels, she is impatient to feel more. For him to feel more. 

Rey pulls on his shoulders and arches up against him so insistently that he shifts his weight until their bodies are aligned together. He fumbles between them until his tip is slotted against her and he can press inside.

The muscles of her stomach tense and spasm. Rey hisses.

“This hurts,” he says in alarm and tries to pull away. Rey presses her knees towards each other, trapping him in place.

“It’s supposed to,” she argues. She doesn’t actually know that, but she’s heard enough, and she welcomes the sensation, which is present and compelling like nothing else has been for days, slicing through her personal fog of confusion and grief. She shifts her hips, trying to make room for him inside her. He’s too big. He’s a big man, too wide through his shoulders and between her legs. Was. Is. 

“No,” he says flatly. “It’s not.” Her body aches when he pulls away, but before she can cry out again, he’s sliding further down her body. She doesn’t realize what he’s doing until his broad palms cup her thighs and pull them apart.

“Oh,” she says in stupified wonder when he presses an apologetic kiss against that small space he abraded. His lips are soft and warm against her, and she is so glad he remembered that important detail. He slides his hands down to the apex of her thighs so that his thumbs can part her to his view. He sighs audibly. 

Rey squirms under his gaze. “This wouldn’t be necessary if you didn’t have such a high opinion of your own—”

He laughs against her body, making her hands clench in his hair. 

“You want”—his tongue flicks out and sends a bolt of pleasure through them both—”me to imagine that it’s  _ smaller _ ?”

“Well, no…” Rey admits as he licks and kisses and sucks, winding the tension in her core like thread around a spindle. 

There’s something to be said for a lover who knows what she’s feeling as soon as she feels it, whether she can verbalize it or not. A lover whose own body shakes when he pulls a fold into his mouth and sucks. A lover who isn’t worried about air or his own pleasure. It’s not enough. But it’s something. 

Rey feels rocked by the sensations of his mouth like an open boat in the ocean, but she has not yet crested the wave she feels coming when he lifts his head and crawls back over her. She opens her arms to him as he covers her body with his own a second time. This time, when he slides into her, there’s no pain, only rightness. Her heartbeat is shuddering in her ears like a drumbeat, and she knows he can hear it too. 

“Tell me it was always going to be like this,” she whispers into his ear as he moves inside her. It feels like the continuation of every conversation they never finished, of every blow they parried.

“Yes,” he says. He kisses her neck below her ear, and holds on with his teeth. She curls her fingers into his shoulders, digging in with her nails. He can’t feel it, but she can imagine the marks she would leave. 

“Every choice we made. Every time we fought. It was always going to end like this,” she says. 

He doesn’t answer in words, but she feels what he feels. His emotions, if not his body. 

That thread of tension is unspooling, and the tears she’s been damming in begin to overflow. She’s still shocked by the way her body shakes around him--and then by his abrupt withdrawal. She blinks in surprise as he curves over her, spending over her stomach and not inside her. Her body is throbbing, but her mind is still cloudy with thwarted desire and a sudden uncertainty. 

“Sorry,” he gasps, collapsing to his side. His hands collect her gently, gathering her against his chest. 

Rey tentatively touches her belly. It’s still there. Wet and tacky. 

“Why did you…?” she asks, confused now. 

He blinks at her as he slides his fingers into her loosened plaits of hair. He speaks reluctantly, but holds her gaze. 

“A story I heard once from...from Luke. About my grandfather. About how he was born to Shmi Skywalker. I didn’t want to risk it. If this would even have anything to do with…”

His voice trails off. Rey fights back against an unearned stab of anger. A baby is the last thing she needs right now, but it’s another thing she feels cheated of. 

“I’m sorry,” Ben repeats again, as if he had anything to apologize for. 

He pushes her back against the mattress, and licks his way down from her breasts, cleansing her of sweat and slick and semen. Her body prickles from the cold air following the warmth of his mouth. 

But one thought crystalizes amidst the swirl of contentious emotions and sensations.

If the Force can make a baby, it can make a body. It only has to have a reason to, Rey thinks. 

* * *

She doesn’t know if Ben sleeps—if he can sleep—but he’s awake and watching her the next morning when she gets up. They don’t speak as she makes breakfast, but she can feel his relief when she begins packing her new portions into the X-wing instead of recommitting to home renovations or moisture farming.

“You’re leaving Tatooine,” he notes with satisfaction.

“Yes,” she says calmly. The Tatooine supplies will last several weeks no matter where she goes next. Ahch-To first, she supposes. That’s where she left the Jedi texts.

“Back to the Resistance?” he asks hopefully. “I meant what I said about my credit accounts. You’ll need—”

“No,” she says. “Ahch-To, then perhaps Exegol.”

He pauses. Thinks about it.

“There’s no need for that,” he says. “I can teach you what else I learned before I burned the Jedi Temple, or if you don’t want to learn from me, you could ask—” He shuts his mouth before he has to utter his uncle’s name again, but she knows what he’s thinking. 

“I need to learn something the two of you never knew,” she says smoothly, returning to the Lars homestead for the parachute. It will need re-folding (and perhaps a good wash), but she’ll be ready to fly two people home in the X-wing, no matter how long that takes. 

Ben is quiet as she does it. But he’s standing next to her ship with arms folded when she returns.

“Darth Vader spent his entire wretched existence searching for a way to bring back his wife. He failed,” he points out. 

“And your grandmother wasn’t a Force ghost, was she? He never saw her again.” 

Ben’s jaw works in a way that is becoming familiar. Rey pauses after she stuffs the parachute in with her protein blocks.

“You know something,” she accuses Ben. 

His lips purse mulishly. 

“Tell me,” she orders him. He turns away.

“This isn’t why I’m here,” he says. 

“I don’t care,” she tells him in her crispest Jedi voice. 

His silence is pointed. 

“Tell me!” she yells, serenity breaking.

He turns back and his expression is heartbreaking. He doesn’t answer her. Instead, he vanishes.

She gasps at the betrayal. 

“Ben!” she screams. She calls his name again. “Ben Solo!” 

She can still feel him. His pain is sharp spike in her mind, but his determination is like a wall of ice. “Ben!”

He doesn’t answer her.

Her hands shake as she ascends the ladder to the X-wing cockpit. It will be so much harder without Ben at her side. The controls blur through her tears. Her fingers fumble on the pre-flight checklist so many times that BB-8 gives an alarmed whistle. 

“Lothal,” says a voice outside the ship.

Rey turns her head. It’s not Ben standing in front of the empty homestead. It’s Leia, ethereal and serene. Her hands are clasped in front of her. 

“What?” Rey gasps, wiping snot and tears on the back of her hand. Her face feels swollen and puffy. She needs to get herself together to be safe to fly.

“Lothal. He heard a story about Lothal. We both did, from an old Lasat rebel, back when Ben was a child. About a hidden temple and a padawan who used it to bring back a Jedi who was supposed to die. That’s what he didn’t want to tell you.” 

Rey presses the heels of hands against her eyes, lets her resolve wear away the spaces in her mind that have pooled with grief. “Thanks,” she tells Ben’s mother. “Will it work?”

Leia snorts. “I have no idea. I can promise that death offers no special wisdom, so don’t bother listening to my son if he pulls this crap on you again.”

“I won’t,” Rey promises. “I’ll tell him.”

Leia smiles. “He knows.” 


	3. The Moonlight Shows You What's Real

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check a few minor tw in the endnotes.

_Yes I know that love is like ghosts_

_Oh and the moonlight baby shows you what’s real_

_There ain't language for the things I feel_

_And if I can't have you then no one ever will_

_Oh if I can't have you then no one ever will_

-Lord Huron

Rey’s destiny is riding on the back of the tiny Loth-beetle. It crawls helter-skelter across the sticky wooden table, feelers pointing at the sky, as it explores the buffet of smears, drips, and puddles on offer. This tavern is as likely a spot to uncover usable intelligence about the location of the Jedi temple as any other, which is to say, not very likely. Which is why Rey has left the decision up to the Loth-beetle. If it goes for her mug of Novanian grog first, Rey will leave and try her luck at a different tavern. If it instead samples the plate of deep-fried nerf nuggets cooling on the edge of the table, Rey will stay, and hope that today’s reconnaissance is more productive than that of the three weeks prior.

Lothal, when uttered by Leia’s lips, had seemed like a gift. A clear, simple answer in a universe that had only ever given her more questions. A well-charted Outer Rim world, its skies thick with transport. One largely untouched by war; the planet was so stripped for resources by the Empire that the First Order had laid its hand but gently on the neck of the population. 

When Rey arrived in Lothal’s orbit, the message traffic was thick with communiques spelling out the downfall of the final First Order garrison in the system. When she landed at the outskirts of Capital City, the people of Lothal were celebrating in the streets. It seemed a very simple thing to walk into the crowd and inquire as to her next destination.

She discovered two facts very quickly: Rey of Jakku is known. The Jedi are not.

However ineffectively the First Order had governed Lothal, it had been hated. The members of the Resistance who opposed it, before the end, are so few that their names and faces are spoken widely.

Rey, dressed in her flowing white desert garb, is conspicuous. Unexpectedly, this is a boon. Upon identification, she finds herself hoisted onto the shoulders of a gaggle of juvenile Ithorians and carried off to an impromptu victory party. People bought her food. People bought her drinks (rather a lot of drinks). A wide variety of couches, futons, bedrolls, and even fully-vested guest accommodations were made available to her by the grateful population of Lothal. 

The only problem is, not a single one of them has heard of a Jedi temple. 

Ben didn’t need to kill the past. It’s already dust in its grave.

After inquiries of her new acquaintances failed to yield next steps, Rey tried seeking the will of the Force. Knowing where to go has never been difficult before. She opened herself to it, let it flow through her. Lothal is a wounded world, but one still alive with the hopes and fears of nearly a million souls. 

The Force led her to a bar. 

Ben’s presence in her mind has been remote and unhappy since she left Tatooine, but it shifted into active disapproval after Rey’s third cup of Corellian whiskey. People are more talkative when she drinks with them. She has to find out what they don’t even know they know. Their barriers fall. She grazes lightly over their minds. 

The Jedi are gone. Not even a myth remains. 

So Rey went into another bar. Possibly the Force was telling her that she would find answers in _a_ bar, and not the particular one she’d first explored. That was a week ago.

The Loth-beetle finally makes a decisive turn towards the nerf nuggets. Rey sighs. The only people in the tavern besides her are a copper-skinned elder playing dejarik with an even more aged Chiss against the back wall, and a trio of pale-skinned workingmen are holding up the bar. But a promise is a promise, even if it’s only to herself. 

“This is not what I pictured you doing with your life,” Ben tells her. Rey turns her head from where it is pillowed on her crossed forearms and glares at him. She has heard him mutter the occasional sarcastic aside, but this is the first time he’s shown himself to her since Jakku. He looks the same; the same tattered clothing, the same swept-back hair.

They’re wearing the same jumper. Rey frowns, plucking the oracular insect from her food and setting it on the floor to cover her disquiet. 

“I wasn’t aware you had thought out my future. Up until a month ago, did you have a plan besides dandling me over your knee on the throne of the Sith?” she asks him. 

Taunting Ben is not much fun, anymore. Rather like sitting on a tack and hoping someone else will suffer for it.

Ben ignores her and picks up the mug in front of her. He frowns at the inch of liquid at the bottom, then holds it to her nose. The sour aroma of it makes them rear back in unified disgust. 

“Are you _drunk_?” he asks in a very judgmental tone. Even if he hasn’t made any objectively bad choices lately, she doesn’t see how he has any room to criticize her.

“No,” she tells him very firmly. She _was_ drunk. Earlier. Now she’s not. She doesn’t think she’s been drunk for a half-hour or so, and she’s well on the way to hungover instead.

His hand ghosts over her face, sweeping a loose strand of hair behind her ear. 

“Rey,” he says more softly. “I hate to see you like this. I’m not worth it.”

“No,” she slurs at him, and maybe she is still just a little bit drunk. She pushes his hand away. “You don’t get to pop in and disapprove of me. If you don’t want me to do things my way, you could offer—” The nerf nuggets jump a little in her abdomen, even though she’d been entirely certain they were dead before she ate them. She places a fist below the arch of her ribcage. “—your own brilliant ideas.” 

He only pulls his hand back and smiles at her. Her heart clenches. 

“No,” she says again. “You left me on purpose. I’m angry at you right now. Don’t smile at me.” 

“Well,” he says, scooting his chair closer to her. “That’s familiar, at least.”

“Where have you _been_?” Rey cries. “Even if you won’t help me, you could at least be—” 

_With me_ , she swallows the words.

“I held your hair while you vomited ten credits worth of spice beer in front of the power conversion station two nights ago,” he tells her, one eyebrow arching. “Don’t you remember?”

She doesn’t. 

She opens her mouth to demand a full accounting of the incident, but closes it again when she notices that the three toughs at the bar have taken to their feet and are watching her have an argument with thin air. She closes her lips and tries to pretend that she is busy with with ale and nuggets. 

They are not deterred. With the casual sidelong glances of bullies and pack hunters on any planet, they approach her, leading with jutting chests.

“This is a First Order bar,” the first one tells her. He has about a five-day growth of stubble on his cheeks and a three-day reek of sweat and ale. 

Rey looks around. There’s nothing to indicate that. The two holochess-players are pointedly ignoring them. The droid bartender is in stasis near its dishwasher. 

“I didn’t think there was a First Order anything, after last week,” she says. 

The second tough grabs one of her nuggets and stuffs it into his mouth. Under the table, Rey puts her hand on her saberstaff.

“We know who you are,” he says around his full mouth. “The rebel witch. You were on every single inter-system communique for the past year. Pretty big bounty.” 

_Every single one? Really, Ben?_ Out of the corner of her eye, he shrugs guiltily. 

“Nobody left to pay that bounty,” she says in a tone more mild than she feels.

Their conversation has drawn the attention of the holochess players, who are stowing their pieces away. Rey sighs. She wouldn’t mind a little bar fight, in her mood, but three is about the limit she can handle without risking serious injury. To the others, of course. 

“Nobody left to pay anything, bitch,” the third First Order fan says. “We haven’t been paid in three weeks. Moving cargo for the First Order was the only job with any dignity for a man who cares about the way things ought to be.” 

“You seem like a reasonable person,” Rey murmurs to him. “Why not go explain your beautiful vision of how great things used to be to your fellow citizens? I’m sure they’ll see sense.”

He isn’t expecting this response, so it takes him a while to formulate a rejoinder. When it comes to him, he utters it with great satisfaction.

“Bitch.”

Rey ignites her saber staff, but before she can even jump to her feet, two things happen. 

The Chiss rears up behind Thing One and Thing Two, smacking their heads together with an audible crack. 

The third jobless longshoreman sails through the air at a high rate of velocity, smacking against the far wall and slowly oozing to the floor. The Force swirls and eddies through the bar in his wake. 

Rey stares accusingly at Ben, but he lifts his hands in innocent confusion.

“Oh, that was me,” says the bearded human, who now looks a bit winded. His brilliant blue eyes crinkle at the corners. “Ezra Bridger. Would you two like to come talk somewhere quieter? I imagine it will be quite loud when these scumbags wake up.”

* * *

‘Somewhere quieter’ turns out to be a tea shop, several blocks away. A family of willowy Twi’lek proprietors recognizes Bridger upon his entrance and plies them all with pots of spicy brew. 

Bridger looks Ben straight in the eye and gestures for him to take a seat. 

Ben is a bit bewildered. “I don’t know you,” he says, shooting a glance at Rey to warn her as he complies.

“Oh, but I know who you are,” Ezra says. 

Ben and Rey both tense.

“You look just like your mother. Are you Princess Organa’s son?” 

Rey blinks at that. Ben’s been described in many different ways by many people, but it must have been a long time for Ben since someone has called him that. 

“I was,” Ben says after a long pause.

The Chiss man puts his teacup down. “As interesting as half of this conversation is, I feel it is veering into territories I’d best not visit.” He stands, looks down at Ezra. “Same time, next week?” 

“Sure,” Ezra says. “You pick the new tavern.”

Rey coverly runs a hand over Ben’s arm. Her fingers go right through it. He’s still gone. 

She turns back to Ezra. “You can talk with Ben,” she notes.

“As do you, Jedi,” Ezra responds.

“I’m not really a Jedi,” Rey feels compelled to confess.

Ezra smiles. “Me neither.” 

He leans back in his chair, folding his fingers across his gently-padded midsection. “So, not-a-Jedi, what brings you to Lothal?”

Rey feels oddly at ease with the man, and opens her mouth to tell her entire, sad story to the stranger. But then she shuts it. There’s never been a single other person in the universe who wanted to help Ben Solo, besides her. There’s no reason one will appear now.

“I’m researching the origins of the Jedi Order,” she tells him, managing not to lie. “I need to find the Jedi Temple that once stood here.”

Ezra scratches at his beard as he thinks about it.

“And that doesn’t have anything to do with your tame Force ghost here, who feeds you bar snacks instead of dispensing the wisdom of the ages?”

Rey snorts at the idea that Ben has wisdom to dispense to her. 

“He is also not a Jedi,” Rey says. 

“Ah,” Ezra says, looking them up and down. “Well. The Jedi warned me ten different ways not to use the Jedi Temple here, but I suppose telling you where it used to be won’t matter, since you’re not Jedi.” 

“Used to be?” Rey asks, her heart sinking.

“I’m happy to tell you the coordinates, but there’s nothing there. I destroyed it thirty years ago to keep it from the Empire. There’s nothing left.”

* * *

Rey shakes off Ezra’s offer of lodging at his home for the night and heads straight for her X-wing. She ignores Ben’s gentle whispers as he urges her to contact the Resistance, make some plans for her return.

She will see it for herself. Men have lied to her before. She will make no plans that do not involve Ben in the gunner’s seat on their flight out.

There is a broad, grassy plain that extends from the outskirts of Capitol City north to the tundra. She sees the backs of Loth-wolves and smaller creatures disappearing between the reeds, but no other people. Ezra’s coordinates lead to a spot no different from the miles of ground and sky that stretch in every direction. 

She climbs down the ladder to the springy earth and digs in her toes. She lets her hands brush the tops of the grasses. The Force is here. The Force is everywhere there are living things—in the insects, the plants, the invisible organisms breaking them down when they die—but there is something here. Rey can feel it. For the first time since Ben Solo died in her arms, Rey smiles. 

She makes camp. She has a bedroll and supplies for a few days. 

Ben watches her passively as she walks around the area, searching for a likely spot. Ezra was speaking the truth to the extent he said the temple was gone. There’s not even a boulder remaining to disturb the flat plain. But there’s still something there, she can feel it. 

So she clears a small circle of earth and sinks to it. She makes herself comfortable, centers herself in the Force. And then, she does what she does best. She waits. 

* * *

Rey comes out of her meditative trance to find that it is the middle of the night. She has sunk two feet into the soil, in a perfect circle of about six feet in diameter. She now rests on flat piece of cut stone. The Jedi Temple. Ben is standing on the lip of the new crater, holding a bowl.

“Stew?” he asks her. 

She climbs out of the circle and gratefully accepts it from him. 

“How did you get a fire started?” she asks him between bites. It’s pretty terrible—but she supposes he learned the culinary arts from neither Leia nor Luke nor Snoke. 

“Sith lightning,” he says airily.

She wobbles on the edge of being concerned before Ben laughs in her face. “There were matches in the emergency pack of the X-wing. Still wrapped.” 

After filling her stomach, she heads back to her circle.

“Come down here with me,” she calls to Ben. 

He obliges, coming to sit cross-legged opposite her.

Ezra refused to tell her anything about how the Temple worked or how he had used it to bring someone back from the dead. “You can’t thwart the will of the Force,” had been his parting words. 

She wasn’t here to thwart anything. The quiet, dusty death of Ben Solo, which had gone unnoticed and unremarked by the entire galaxy, even Rey, in that moment—could not represent the will of anything. His story wasn’t over yet. She only had to write the next page.

Ben covers her hands with his own, and she pulls on her awareness of him. He feels no closer or farther from her than ever in this place. If she thought it would be as simple as making him solid forever—it is not. 

She meditates with him, reaching down into the earth, up to the sky. The Force is there, moving through them and with them. But when she next opens her eyes, she is on her back, the sun is beating down into her face, and she has bruises from lying on the bare stone. 

“There has to be a trick to this,” she tells Ben, eyeing him sidelong. He has no impediment to sitting and watching her all night and all day, and it makes her a little annoyed. She has the brief, passing fantasy of Ben getting a terrible head cold. Of wrapping his head in cool towels and feeding him soup. She’d do it, too, she resolved. 

“I know nothing more than you do,” Ben says mildly. 

“Well, that’s bound to be true sometimes,” Rey sniffs. 

He says nothing more, and after a moment, Rey settles herself on the stone again.

“You don’t want breakfast?” Ben asks. 

“Later,” she says.

* * *

_Be with me, be with me._

Rey seeks after the voices that held her up through her last duel. All fallen silent. 

_Be with me, be with me._

“They won’t help you,” Ben says, once he discerns what she’s doing. “Not for me. Not even for you, not anymore.”

“Unless they want the Jedi order to end here, in the middle of this forsaken scrap of grassland, they’ll help me,” she says. 

He frowns at her as he puzzles through that. 

“What do you mean end here?” he asks. 

She ignores him.

 _Be with me, be with me_. 

“Rey, what do you mean? What are you doing?”

He figures it out when she curls into herself instead of getting up for dinner. 

He wraps himself around her, and he mostly forgets to make it solid, but she gets the impression of his care and worry in the Force anyway.

“It doesn’t work that way,” he says. “They don’t care if you’re hurting. They all died hurting.” 

“I’ll make it work. Or the Jedi end with us.”

He presses insubstantial lips against the back of her neck as she sleeps, dreamlessly,

The next day she sits up and lets the Force run through her and into the ground. There is something there. Quiet. Sleeping. Ben floats her canteen to her lips, but she turns her head.

“I wish I could carry you away until you give this up,” he says.

She’s a little surprised that he hasn’t tried. She doesn’t think he could win, seeing as she has a body and he does not, but she anticipated him trying.

“I don’t have my own strength anymore,” he answers the unspoken question. “Only yours.”

And hers is fading with each hour that she sits under the sun, begging ghosts to help their last surviving son. 

At some point she falls back, face still turned to the sky. 

Ben holds her head in his lap and croons a steady stream of failure. She can travel to a green planet. He will tell her everything Skywalker ever taught him. He will make love to her every night. He will never regret what they’ve done. She can go, knowing she tried. 

Rey grits her jaw not to waste her tears.

“You were much more convincing when you were chasing me around the galaxy and offering me your hand,” she tells him, voice cracking. 

He leans over her, smiling upside-down over crooked teeth. “Was I?”

No. She is so very tired of being sad and tired. Her mind can almost convince her that what he’s offering will be enough. Half a life. One in this world, one in the next. But she’s always been more stubborn than him. 

Hunger and thirst pass, and she knows that’s a bad sign. It’s a place she never reached, even in the worst months of Jakku. 

She wonders if she will become a Force ghost like Ben when she dies, or whether they’ll both be free. She wouldn’t mind dying for Ben. She wouldn’t kill for him. She wouldn’t change for him. But dying for him? That’s easy. He hadn’t hesitated when it was his turn. When she does what’s right without regard for the consequences, it’s easy to decide. 

“I don’t want this,” Ben whispers. “I didn’t want this for you. I wanted you to live.” 

“You don’t get to make that choice for me,” Rey says, and speaking makes her pant with the effort. 

“All my choices were bad ones until that last one, Rey, don’t you see? You’re the only thing I ever got right. Let me have this,” he says, more insistently. “If you’re happy, I’ll feel it. It will be enough.” 

“They’re going to listen to me,” Rey insists. All those voices. All those Jedi. They’d been with her. She had felt their love. If they maintained one troubling blind spot over the person of Ben Solo, it was only up to her to change their minds. To see what she saw. His tremulous smile, before he died for her. 

“They _won’t._ You don’t think I asked? You don’t think I begged them for guidance? On my _knees_ , Rey. They let Palpatine have me. I won’t let you die for their pride too.” 

His voice is getting louder and louder. The small insects and crawling things that have drawn close to Rey as she has moved less and less take flight. Ben’s growing distress feeds on her own, creating a feedback loop. 

“I wish you’d never met me,” Ben yells at her. “We’d both be alive and you’d never miss me. Maker, can’t you just accept I got exactly what I wanted?” His form, more insubstantial than it’s been before, rolls to crouch over her. His teeth are bared, and his face is as fierce as Kylo Ren’s had ever been. 

“I missed you before I’d ever met you,” Rey yells back. “And you don’t know me at all if you think I will ever, ever stop trying to bring you home!”

He opens his mouth to respond, but a faint laugh cuts the motion of tension like a laser through flesh. 

“You two are screaming loud enough to wake the dead,” a woman’s voice scolds them. Rey fights a wave of weariness and scans for the source. 

They are not alone. 

Seated cross-legged from them is a young Togruta, haloed in blue light. 

She chuckles. “But I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it?” 

Rey’s chest expands so quickly with relief that she feels faint. 

Ben grimaces. “Ahsoka Tano? Is that who you are?”

The Togruta smiles inscrutably. “You look just like your mother. All you Skywalkers are too pretty for your own good.” 

Ben blushes when he looks back at Rey, and his puzzled frown is the last thing she sees before she faints.

* * *

When Rey comes to, the Togruta Force ghost is spooning carbohydrate paste down her throat. She swallows it gratefully, then forces herself into a seated position. 

“So you’re the last Skywalker now? I have to say, they may have had it in looks, but not much for brains, that family,” Ahsoka tells her when she’s finished feeding Rey most of her portions. 

Ben snorts, but he can’t really dispute that.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Rey says. “You’re here.” The Togruta looks very unimpressed with this line of argument. 

“You can’t extort the Force,” Ahsoka scolds her. “It cares, if you can say that it cares at all, about systems. Balance. Not individuals.” 

“It helped me before,” Rey says, struggling to a seated position. She’s still weak from her hunger strike, but food and sleep are rapidly restoring her. 

“Because before, you were destined to defeat all the ancient Sith, put together in one evil shell. And now—”

“I’m the same person I was then,” Rey says. “If I was worthy then, I’m worthy now. It wasn’t just the Force. I heard them. All their voices, Jedi I didn’t even know. They can help me. You can help me. You can just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it myself.” 

Ahsoka props both hands under her chin. “The Jedi don’t care if you want fat brown-eyed babies and a well-earned retirement.” 

Ben chokes a little on that, but Rey holds Ahsoka’s eyes.

“It’s not fair,” she says. “They helped me. Why didn’t they help Ben?” 

Ahsoka flicks her montral to the side, looking pensive. “The Jedi were never very good at forgiveness.” 

Another wave of dizziness washes through Rey. Ben’s hands cup the back of her neck and her head to support her. It’s like Ben said. The Force and the Jedi have washed their hands of Ben Solo. Had done so before Rey ever met him. 

“Luckily,” says Ahsoka, “I am no Jedi.” 

Rey and Ben scramble to clear the area before Ahsoka rolls up her glowing blue sleeves and takes one knee on the center of the stones uncovered by Rey. She very dramatically places her palm against the ground. 

There is a vibration at first. Rey can’t say if the vibration is in the Force or the earth, but it shakes her teeth and consumes all of her focus. 

The vibrations turn to waves, and the earth moves like an erupting volcano as boulders sprout like mushrooms after the rain. One after another, all around Rey. Her bones rattle and she spares a thought for her X-wing. Oh well. She’ll worry about that after Ben’s safe in her arms.

There is a pause in the earthquake.

“Is that it?” Rey asks Ahsoka. There are a number of rocks sticking out of the ground now, but nothing that appears to be classifiable as a ‘temple’ of any sort.

Ahsoka’s form bends and shimmers.

“Minor setback,” the Force ghost says, panting.

“What’s the problem?” Rey calls to her.

The Force ghost appears to rub her back. “Need a little more juice. A little backup.” She pauses. Clears her throat. “Backup!”

Rey and Ben look around. There’s still nobody else for miles.

“I said, ‘backup!’” Ahsoka yells, and birds take flight some distance away.

After this last screech, a second blue-tinged form appears next to her.

“Ahsoka,” the sandy-haired man says in a long-suffering tone of voice. “We talked about this.”

“ _You_ talked about this,” Ahsoka says. “I didn’t listen.” 

“This isn’t something you can just call in as a favor, Snips,” the second Force ghost sighs. 

Ben makes a choked noise of recognition next to Rey, and she reaches out to take his hand. It passes through him, but he gives her a look of gratitude nonetheless.

“It’s not a favor for me,” Ahsoka argues. “It’s for the kid. Seems like you owe him one.”

Anakin Skywalker draws a very pretentious face, in Rey’s opinion. 

“The Jedi temple is not meant to undo the sacrifices of the greatest heroes of the Force. You were the one who told Ezra that,” he says. 

“Oh, so I got out because I wasn’t being sacrificed? Or because I wasn’t being heroic? You thought I looked pretty heroic as you prepared to sacrifice me,” Ahsoka argues right back.

Anakin covers his forehead with one hand. This appears to be an ongoing argument between them. 

“If you think the Force is done with both of them, there’s no problem with letting them have their pension,” Ahsoka says. 

“Please,” Ben says. It’s the first time he’s spoken the entire time. “Grandfather.” 

Anakin jolts a little bit at the word, finally looking at Rey and Ben where they stand, hand in hand. HIs eyes flicker away, as though he can't quite bear to look at them. 

His face is young, but his eyes are very, very old. Old and sad, Rey thinks. 

Anakin turns away from them. Looks at the ground where Ahsoka stands.

“There’s only one narrow path in there that will lead them both out,” he says. “A million that lead to disaster.” He closes his eyes. Rey can’t tell whether he’s just agreed to help or not, but he takes a knee as Ahsoka did, and this time she has the warning to fall to her own hands and knees to brace herself before the earth shakes again. 

This time, a great stone structure rises smoothly from the ground, reaching many stories into the sky. The spires of the Jedi Temple loom over them, stretching heavenward like imploring hands. Murals of animals cavort across all flat surfaces, moving whenever Rey turns her gaze on them. Ben, unaffected by the shaking ground, looks on in awe as the images converge on the wall in front of them. The animals form three circles, which wheel nearer and farther before shimmering into a flat, golden plane. A portal. 

Ahsoka dusts her hands off on her pants, cleansing herself of ectoplasmic dirt. 

Anakin looks at her fondly.

“He looks like her,” he says as the two of them begin to fade.

“Leia?” Ahsoka asks, just before her silhouette is gone. “Yes, I thought so too.”

“No,” says Anakin. “Padme.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tw for some quasi-suicidal ideation and unhealthy drinking by Rey.


	4. Oh Go On Baby, Hurt Me Tonight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you may have noticed that the chapter count went up. The ending has not changed, but when it came time to wrap this all up neatly at the end of chapter 4, I noticed that there was no room for any banging. And I like banging. 
> 
> Then I had a chat with KyloTrashForever (who has been the soft dom/beta that this fic needs) that went like this:
> 
> Me: Can I add two more chapters to make room for more banging?  
> Court: What does your heart tell you?  
> Me: That I like banging.  
> Court: You do like banging.
> 
> So anyway, I have permission. I hope you enjoy two extra chapters of banging and pathos before Ben steps out of the World Between Worlds.

_I don't feel it till it hurts sometimes_

_Oh go on baby, hurt me tonight_

_I want ours to be an endless song_

_Baby in my eyes you can do no wrong_

-Lord Huron

* * *

There’s no physical sensation to stepping into the World Between Worlds. If anything, there is an absence of physical sensation. There is no life between the worlds, and where there is no life, there is only the Force that Rey generates. She feels blinded, although her eyes can see. 

What she perceives at first is an ocean. She stands on the edge of a limitless plain of still, grey water, her boots digging into a small outcropping of featureless rock. There is light, although she cannot locate the sun. 

Ben is next to her, less substantial than he’s ever been. She can look right through him to a narrow chain of boulders branching away in paths through the water. Some she can jump to. Others, she thinks she would have to swim. 

When she looks closer, she sees there are other boulders, other paths. She blinks. She was positive some of them were not there until the moment she focused her gaze on them.

“I didn’t dress to get wet,” she mutters. 

Ben looks at her in mild surprise. “Wet? Where do you see the water?”

She spreads her hands. “It’s all around us. Don’t you see it?”

The ocean spreads in all directions. There’s no land to be seen. Even the portal behind them is merely a flat golden sheet of no substance, hanging in the air. 

Ben’s jaw works as he scans their surroundings. “I see something different,” he finally states. 

“Show me?”

She hasn’t ever asked him for this, not since the first time, but he is unquestioningly obedient. She reaches for his face and places the tips of her fingers over where his forehead would be if he were corporeal. There’s a stomach-twisting moment where her fingers press in too far, but Ben barely seems to notice. 

In a rush of foreign emotions, Rey gains Ben’s perspective. Only it’s not from his physical perspective, eight inches above and two feet to the right, but her own. It’s the vantage point of her own eyes, only filtered through Ben’s soul.

And he sees something different. Where there was an ocean he sees instead a sea of stars. Velvet blackness intersected by distant suns and paths of dazzling white light. Portals like letters drawn in white ink on black paper. 

“Oh!” Rey gasps. It’s beautiful, in an inhuman way. “Why can’t I see it?” 

“This isn’t a place for the living,” Ben says. “You need a guide.”

Rey looks back at the portal where they entered. Ahsoka was the Jedi who died and lived again, maybe she would—

“No, Rey. Me. I know where to go,” Ben says.

Rey hates the reminders that Ben counts himself among the dead. But he is already pulling away from her, choosing a path that is indistinguishable from a hundred others to her eyes, but putting one foot in front of another unerringly. 

“Where are we going?” she asks. She has to jog to catch up to him. His legs were--

His legs _are_ so much longer than hers. “That much is up to you,” Ben says, “but we’re walking along my life.”

“Your life?” Rey asks. 

He nods. “Look.”

They stop on a boulder indistinguishable from the others they have crossed. It has no mark to set it apart from the rest, but there is a way that she can look at the air and see a flicker there. A transparency. A place where her perspective shifts. She reaches out a tentative finger, and the air bends and wobbles. 

“You need to use the Force to open it,” Ben says. “I can’t do it. I can hold it open, maybe.” 

“Maybe?” That isn’t very reassuring. 

“It’s your power. But if I’m on this side, a piece of you is too.”

Rey pokes it again, this time trying to feel what is on the other side. As soon as she projects her awareness through the invisible barrier, a new world forms like an image etched on a frosted windowpane. 

“Leia!” Rey gasps, and Ben stills to a statue next to her.

They watch the new world like a holovid. Leia is young—maybe even younger than Rey—and she holds a squalling, black-haired infant in her arms. Rey has never known Leia to look less than pristine, but in this scene, she is wearing a shapeless grey dress, and her long hair runs down her back in a frazzled braid. 

Ben is not watching her bounce the crying baby. His gaze has turned to the figure pacing back and forth at the edge of their field of vision. Han is more recognizable to Rey. He wears high boots and loose white shirt over lean pants, and his hands drift towards his pockets as though searching for a tracking beacon. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take him?” Han asks Leia.

“You can’t take a baby on a smuggling run,” Leia scolds him, a thread of anger curling through her words.

“Hey. The Empire imposed the tariffs. There ain’t any Empire left, ergo no tariffs. It’s not smuggling if you’re not avoiding tariffs. It’s just moving cargo,” he argues, more from the force of habit than any real conviction, Rey can tell.

“We don’t even need the credits,” Leia shoots back. The baby in her arms, who is surely Ben, abruptly lets out a howl of outrage.

“Is he hungry?” Han asks, forehead creasing in concern. 

“No!” Leia snaps. “I just fed him. He’s not hungry, he’s not wet, he’s not uncomfortable, he’s just...difficult.” She huffs in frustration, shifting the baby to the other shoulder and half-heartedly patting at his back. 

Baby Ben whimpers against her neck. 

“He hasn’t slept more than an hour straight this week,” Leia whispers.

“I can wait,” Han offers half-heartedly. “There’s another launch window this evening. I could hold him. You can get a nap or something.”

There are deep purple hollows cut under his eyes. 

“If you want to go, go then,” Leia says stiffly. Rey holds her breath as Han’s gaze runs over his wife and child. He hesitates in the doorway for a minute, then nods. His posture is guilty as he slinks away, relief making his steps come more quickly as they fade from earshot.

Ben’s noises of protest slow until he is slack and heavy in Leia’s arms. Leia quickly moves to a bassinet floating nearby and settles him there, breath held anxiously until her hands are free of him. 

Only then do her shoulders slump. 

“Please sleep,” she mouths at the sleeping infant before tiptoeing from the room. 

Rey steps in as Leia steps out.

Ben was a beautiful baby. His hair is thick and dark, and his arms fall to the sides of his head, listless in their heroic pose of victory. Tiny fists are furled like rosebuds. 

Rey looks down at her body. It appears as corporeal as everything else around her. This is not her world. Not her time. But she can still feel the Force. And she can feel Ben. Her bond is somehow split; she has her awareness of him behind her, standing in the mouth of the portal, yes, still, but also…

She can sense him in his carrier too, perceive his indistinct, unformed child’s mind. 

He is fearful. He thinks of Leia, mostly. Her touch. Her arms. He wants his mother. Because there is something else, always, a terrible sound, an uncomfortable feeling. He can’t sleep, because there is a black flicker at the edge of his awareness that steals the innocent joy of slumber. He whimpers, still asleep. 

“Oh,” Rey says, approaching his carrier. She sets a hand lightly on his featherdown hair, looking closer. The Force swirls around him already. Golden threads connecting him to Leia, Luke, and now to her. But also darkness, like a slick of oil on top of clean water. 

“He’s there already,” Rey tells the other Ben, watching her from behind the portal. He nods, unsurprised. Rey supposes that he cannot remember a time when the dark side of the Force did not call to him. Was it ever that, or only Palpatine, reaching across the ages for him? 

Ben jolts below her hand. His dark grey eyes slowly focus on the woman standing over him. His tiny nose wrinkles. Awake again, he begins to cry. His face is screwed up and red, eyelids puffy. 

Rey jerks her hand back guiltily. Did she wake him up? She hears Leia stirring in the other room. 

“I have to tell her,” Rey says to the Ben who stands in the portal. He shakes his head, but Rey steps away from the bassinet and towards the doorway Leia left through. 

Leia appears a few moments later, and Rey stiffens her shoulders to explain her presence in Leia’s child’s bedroom. 

Instead, Leia steps right through her. The sensation is like plunging into ice water. Rey gasps, but Leia takes no notice of her. 

“Oh, baby,” Leia sighs, picking Ben up and beginning to soothe him again. “Please. Mama really needs four hours together. Just four hours. Can you give me four hours?”

The baby’s eyes are still fixed on Rey as he begins to howl in earnest. She’s a stranger, Rey supposes, and she summoned the darkness. 

“Leia, can you hear me?” Rey begs. “There’s something wrong. It’s not Ben.”

Leia ignores her, jiggling her child the way humans have done since time immemorial. Ben’s tears don’t stop. 

“Leia,” Rey tries one last time. Leia gives no response, instead sinking to the ground, still holding Ben tightly. She kneels, crooning a lullaby. 

Rey can’t even feel her. She can’t feel anything but Ben. 

Rey backs away from them. There’s nothing she can do here. Leia and Ben will have to endure a little longer.

She reaches for the portal, and Ben’s hand pulls her back through.

* * *

Rey’s feet drag as they walk on. Part of her wants to go back. Try again. Try something else. She can’t exactly take the baby with her, but maybe she could have tried harder to warn Leia, maybe she could write a note—

“Where do you want to go next?” Ben asks. 

Rey looks around. Every rock looks just like every other rock. The sea is as inscrutable as it was before. 

“Why couldn’t Leia see me?” she asks. “Wasn’t l like you? A Force ghost? Was I doing it wrong?”

Ben shakes his head. “It’s my life you’re looking into. I think my life is the only one you can change. I saw you.”

She presses her lips together, wondering if he knows anything else he’s not telling her. 

“Do you know where to go? To find you?”

“Where do you want to go?” he pivots again.

Rey lets her breath out over her closed lips. She doesn’t want to raise him. That would create an entire host of new and strange problems, in addition to breaking Leia and Han’s hearts prematurely, were Ben to vanish in childhood.

“Maybe some point where you’re closer to my age,” she says.

Ben nods, expression guarded. “Okay.”

Rey doesn’t have a great sense of time in this place. She doesn’t know if they’ve been walking for half an hour or days. 

She resists the urge to stop and look through each portal that she passes. She doesn’t want to be a spectator in Ben’s life. It’s not fair to him. When she brings him back, she wants him to tell her all these stories. If he wants to. Seeing them for herself would feel like stealing. 

“Here,” he says on another unmarked rock. “I was a padawan. This is the year Luke sent me to the Senate.”

“Is that when you found out? About your grandfather?”

Ben shakes his head. “No. They whispered about me, but that was nothing new.” This time, he is the one who presses his hand to the plane that unlocks the portal. 

The scene that emerges is of a tall, stone building on a hill, its shape suggestive of the spires on Lothal. It is night there, but the grounds are lit by torches. Two figures walk down the hill to a cluster of wood-and-stone huts reminiscent of the primitive structures on Ahch-To. Rey recognizes Luke easily; he looks little different from the man she knew, only somewhat younger and better groomed. The other—

Ben is a tall figure frozen on the edge between gawky adolescence and adult strength, trailing behind his uncle. Familiar and a stranger all at once. 

It’s his hair, Rey thinks dizzily. It is cut shorter than she’s ever seen it, save for the trailing braid of a padawan learner. It makes his ears and nose look more prominent, or perhaps he hasn’t yet fully grown into them. He wears brown and cream robes in lumpy homespun wool and flax, an outfit Rey’s mind reels at, so different from the unrelieved black he will don as Kylo Ren. Ben’s grumpy expression, however, is entirely recognizable as he shuffles his feet, following Luke. 

“I wouldn’t mind staying in the guest quarters until we figure something out,” he tells Luke as Rey watches unseen from the doorway between worlds. 

Luke barks a disdainful laugh. “I’m sure you wouldn’t. The only problem is that the guest quarters are for guests, and you are not a guest.”

“If I’m not a guest, why did you give my room away?” Ben grumbles. 

“We needed it for the new kids,” Luke says, unaffected. “Besides, this is better. You’ll have more privacy.”

He gestures at one of the doorless stone structures, then they both duck in. Ben scrapes the top of his head and curses in Huttese under his breath.

“What do I need privacy for?” Ben asks, more to himself than Luke, but he takes off a satchel that must contain his belongings and drops it on the ground. 

Luke answers anyway. “I don’t know, do you still wake up the whole building with those screaming nightmares?” Luke asks, and his tone is flippant, but his gaze is shrewd. 

Ben doesn’t respond. The question lingers. 

“Right,” Luke says. “Well, meals are still at the same times. I’ll see you tomorrow. You got everything?” 

“Sure,” Ben says, dejected. He pulls a bedroll out of his back and unspools it over a stone shelf.

“Goodnight Ben.”

“Goodnight, Master.”

Ben pulls a few more odds and ends out of his sack and begins arranging them on the stone table on the other side of the hut. A datapad. A lightsaber. Pens, sticks of ink. A crudely-bound sheaf of paper. 

Rey waits until Luke’s silhouette has ascended the entire hill before she steps through. She looks down at herself, checking that she appears solid and real. She’s wearing the same white clothes she wore on Lothal. 

Behind her, Ben nods. Before her, Ben has grabbed a wooden rake and is trying to push gravel out of his hut. He’s cursing again.

“Hello?” Rey asks, and he’s so surprised to see anyone there that he drops the rake on his foot.

He jumps, but he swallows his curse this time. His eyes quickly run over her, but he stops at her face.

“You—”

Rey blinks. “Me?”

He closes his mouth. Thinks. Opens it again. “Have we met?”

“No, I don’t think so?” Rey says, truthfully. He can’t possibly remember her from infancy. Can he? Is this the same timeline?

His jaw works, and he straightens. 

“Are you one of Master Luke’s students?”

“Yes,” Rey says, glad to be able to answer honestly. It’s not the entire truth, but it is _a_ truth. 

“I don’t suppose you’re the one who got my old quarters,” he says sourly.

“Pardon?” Rey asks, raising an eyebrow. 

He takes stock of himself again, and she sees his ears go red. 

“I mean...I’m sorry. I’m Ben. You probably knew that.”

“Rey,” she says, extending her hand to him. He takes it gingerly, chapped and calloused fingers closing around her own. His ears are still flaming. She smiles, despite herself. He doesn’t ask for her surname, or give his own. 

Rey surveys the hut. It’s awfully bare, even worse than her little home on Jakku. “Is this all you have?”

“Ah,” Ben says, looking around, judging the little structure once again. He glances away, up the hill. Furtively. “Not quite.” 

He fishes in his pack, finally coming up with a large, metal thermos. He shakes it in invitation. “I have this bottle of Corellian whiskey? I was planning on drinking it and starting a campfire, and hoping that between the two, I stay warm.”

Rey’s so surprised by that statement that she snorts in laughter. It’s so unlike Kylo. Maybe more like the Ben she’s coming to know. 

“Are padawans allowed to drink?” she asks him, wanting to tease him a little before she dumps his fate at his feet. 

He lifts his eyebrows at her imploringly. “I’m sure they can, if they share. That’s compassion, right?”

Rey grins at him. “Well, in that case.” She follows Ben into the hut, and the faint smile of the ghost in the portal behind her feels like a benediction.

* * *

Two hours later, the fire is only smoking embers, but Rey doesn’t feel the chill of the night air. She’s snug against Ben’s shoulder, seated on his thin bedroll. The bottle of whiskey is half gone, doled out sip by sip in the metal cup they’ve shared.

“The Jedi Council back in Coruscant didn’t take students old enough to remember their lives before their training,” Ben is telling her.

Rey frowns. “But what if they found out they were Force-sensitive when they were our age?” 

Ben shrugs. “I guess they didn’t care. They wanted people who wouldn’t want anything besides the Order.” He passes the whiskey back to her. The cup is on the other side of him, and Rey decides she’s done bothering with anything but the bottle. 

Rey tosses another swallow back, enjoying the burn. His eyes follow the line of her throat and the movement of her mouth. She supposes Ben’s words are the opening she’s been waiting for. 

“Do you? Want something besides the Jedi?” she asks him, staring at the liquid left at the bottom of the thermos. 

He waits so long to answer that she has to look back at him, finds him staring at her. His gaze is frank and assessing, honest as it’s ever been. 

“Sometimes,” he says, eyes falling to her lips. She feels that look like a caress, more than the whiskey heating her stomach. 

He doesn’t look surprised when she closes the distance between them, pressing her mouth against his. His lips are as full and soft as she remembers, eager where they’d been gentle. He tastes like campfire smoke and whiskey and ozone. 

She should stop now and tell him who she is. Who she’ll be to him. She hasn’t really thought this through: is it possible to warn him? Can she walk out of the World between Worlds and find a different reality than the one she left, one where Ben never fell? Will she still be a lonely child in Jakku, gazing up at stars that will never come down to the ground?

She can tell him. She can tell him to go in ten years—no, maybe five—and find a particular girl, in a particular ruin—

Or she can just ask him to come with her. She can take him away from this anxious place, because she has a home ready for him right now, and she wants him right now, she doesn’t want to wait anymore when her entire life has been waiting—

She doesn’t make a decision. But Ben slides his tongue into her mouth, and she opens to him. His hands hover over her face and hair, touching the lobes of her ears, brushing her collarbone. She pushes her chest against his until the coarse nap of his tunic is scratching her neck. 

With a groan, he stops to pull his gloves off, and then goes after hers. She can think of better things to bare than their arms, but he’s so sweetly single-minded about it that she lets him. When they’re marginally freer, she twines her arms behind his neck and presses kisses against the warm jagged planes of his face. 

He leans back onto his bedroll, pulling her with him. 

She can feel his erection like a bar against her stomach, but he seems content that their legs are tangled together now and her breasts are pressed against his arm. 

“I saw you,” he mutters while she is sucking a color onto his Adam’s apple. 

“What?” she asks, lifting her mouth only long enough to lick the spot she’s marked.

“I saw you. In a dream.”

“A nightmare?” she asks, pulling away until he notices and drags her back to his chest. It’s an awkward position—she’s between his legs, reclining over his chest--but not uncomfortable. For her, anyway. 

“No,” he says, kissing her temple. “A memory, I guess? You were younger. A little girl. Climbing. I wondered who you were. If you were real.” 

He’s never told her this before. She saw him, before she ever met him. It must have been the same for Ben. 

“The Force,” she says solemnly. 

“The Force,” he agrees. Then he slowly reaches a hand up, traces it down her bare shoulder. It’s a question, and one she wants to answer. She goes for the catches in her tunic, and unravels herself again for Ben Solo. This time, his eyes widen in shock, as though he cannot believe his unexpected good fortune. 

“Are there rules against this?” she asks, when she is bare to the waist. His eyes are hot on her breasts, and she gets the strong impression that he is memorizing them for future mental review. 

He grins, and Rey gets another flash of the Ben who died in her arms on Exegol. “I’ve been very careful never to ask my uncle, but I have to think...this could also be shared?”

Rey laughs and lets Ben pull her down over him, her nipple against his red lips. If he doesn’t have a strong grasp of the mechanics, their nascent bond is happy to encourage him when he sucks her breast into his mouth. The graze of his teeth spur little noises from her throat, and his hips jerk against her thighs with each little encouragement. 

His eyes are round and vulnerable when she pulls away from him. She cups his face with her hands and kisses him again. She could stop now. Explain. She should. It’s not right to keep anything from him, especially if this is the Ben she hopes will come home with her, now or five years from now—

But she’s feeling recklessness and greed and the whiskey in her veins in equal measure, and she temporizes, bargains with herself for a few minutes more. He’s so open to her right now, so _happy_ —

And so she slides further down his torso, trailing questioning fingers over the buckle of his belt and the catches in his homespun trousers. His hands hasten to assist her in opening his pants and exposing him, hard and taut and flushed. 

She dodges his hands when they reach for her again, instead curling her shoulders over Ben’s thighs. When she breathes out over him, his hips jerk, and the impressions she gets through their bond nearly undo her. There’s a slick of wet over the tip, and she gives a small, preliminary swipe with her tongue to catch it. 

Ben makes a choked noise, some feet away from the center of her attention. Rey gets the solid implication that this act was not just outside of his experience, but nearly outside of his comprehension. She lifts her head just long enough to smile encouragement at him and drink in his returning smile of dumb wonder. 

Then she spreads her lips and rolls them down his shaft as far as she can. It’s not very far, as a fractional interest in the whole, but it’s enough to make his hands shake where Ben has woven them into her hair. 

She hasn’t done this either, of course, but she quickly realizes that any nuances of form or technique would be wasted on Ben. He’s entranced at the idea that her mouth is on his cock. There is very little she could possibly do to displease him or even delay the orgasm that is currently tightening his balls against his body. So she simply slides her mouth up and down and curls her tongue against the head as neatly as she can, and listens for the moment that his breathing stops. It’s very quick. It’s really no trouble at all, the few moments that she spends there, mouth working his body, before he is filling her throat with saltwater and her emotions with his great, stupefied sense of gladness. 

His hands pull in her hair until he seems to realize that he might be hurting her, and then they’re flying away from her body. He claps them over his own face in an attempt to stifle any yell of victorious completion, though they’re far enough from the Temple that nobody could have possibly heard them. 

Rey wipes her face against his thigh, then bats his trembling fingers away as she tucks him away in his trousers and sets his clothing to rights. 

She props herself over his chest, looking down at him in satisfaction. His eyes are a little white around the edges, but the way he’s panting and undone makes her feel like the victorious one.

“I could—” He swallows, thinking. “I could do something for you—I think I can, anyway…” 

Rey smiles away his small and growing panic that he has not planned any things he could do, should he ever hold a girl half-naked in his arms. 

She grabs at her tunic instead and begins wrapping it back around her body. 

“I’m positive you can, but maybe we should talk, first?”

“Oh,” he says after a pause, watching with a tinge of disappointment as her breasts disappear under her clothing and she brushes her hair back into order. “Maybe we should have talked first. About that.” 

“Don’t worry about what we did, Ben,” she says, trying to soften the transition by petting his chest. His breathing is still quick and unsteady, but he relaxes, running a hand up and down her back in a soothing pattern. 

She struggles for words to start. “Ben, you do have...nightmares, sometimes, don't you?” 

His eyes narrow, and he pulls back fractionally. “Did you hear me talking with Master Luke? Or something from the other students?” 

Rey shakes her head. “No, I—Ben. I mean yes. I heard. But also—I’ve seen you too. Before today.”

Ben’s smile fades. “You didn’t say that.”

Rey leans closer, but he retreats, scooting back. 

“I’m telling you now,” she says.

“Then tell me,” he says, and the sudden chill in his tone rocks her back on her heels. 

“Ben, your nightmares. It’s not natural. It’s something else. It’s the Emperor. Palpatine.” 

Ben has now slid up to a seated position, his back to the stone wall. They breathe in tandem for a few minutes. He processes her statement, quick mind turning it over rapidly. He knows so much more than her, really. Luke has trained him for years. Told him things about the Clone Wars and the Empire that Rey, ignorant child of Jakku, never learned. 

“That’s preposterous. Impossible. And how...How would you even know that,” he says, and it’s a flat statement. “How could you know.”

His eyes roam over her face and body, taking in more details than Rey feels comfortable giving. They land on the saberstaff clipped to her belt. 

“Master Luke would never give a new student a lightsaber,” he says, tone darkening. 

“I built it myself,” Rey says, alarmed by the sudden detour in the conversation.

“And he let you keep it? He wouldn’t,” Ben says suddenly. 

“Ben—you need to listen to me. You need to just listen right now,” Rey says, edging away from him. “I’m here to warn you.”

“Warn me? Why would you warn me, and not Master Luke?” Ben asks, and Rey senses that he’s still churning through the possibilities. 

“The danger-”

“We should tell Master Luke. He should be here for this,” Ben cuts her off, lurching to his feet. “Whoever you are—”

“I’m _Rey_ ,” she insists. 

“If you’re who you say you are and you’re telling the truth, it would be to him,” he says, coming to some kind of decision. 

Rey’s heart catches in her throat. 

“I can’t tell this to him,” Rey says softly. Luke won’t even be able to see her. Ben’s face carves twin grooves of stress into his cheeks as he sucks them into his mouth. Dull anger, mingled with shame, has begun to pulse through their bond. 

As one, they gaze at his lightsaber, lying discarded on the low stone table.

Rey stumbles backwards out of the hut as he calls it to him.

“ _What did you come here for_ _?"_ he yells at her as she scrambles back, eyes fixed on the glowing blue blade of his saber. 

He thrusts it at her and she jumps back without igniting her own. 

“Ben, you need to listen to me,” she calls desperately. “I know you can hear him. I know you haven’t told Luke. Don’t! But don’t listen either. It’s Palpatine, it’s the Sith, it’s not you—”

“You’re insane!” he shouts. “Stay out of my _head!_ ” Rey dodges again, feeling for the location of the portal. It’s hard to see past the sudden rush of tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she stutters at him. “It’s too early. I’ll come back. I’ll come back for you. I promise, I—”

And then she is falling back into the World Between Worlds, and Ben’s hands are barely solid enough to catch her before she crashes into the sea. 


	5. All the Spirits That I Know I Saw

_I don't feel it till it hurts sometimes_

_So go on baby, hurt me tonight_

_All the spirits that I know I saw_

_Do you see no ghosts in me at all?_

-Lord Huron

* * *

Her hands slip on the stone, and her feet splash against the sea. Ben is there to lever her upright, but even once she has regained her balance, she feels the pull of the water. What would happen if she fell in? Is there a bottom? 

She remembers Ben’s view of the sea of stars. Perhaps there is no floor, and she would fall through the worlds endlessly, farther and farther away from him.

“Did you see?” she asks Ben, panting.

“What part?” he responds, and she’d suspect guile, but he is watching her closely.

“Any of it.”

His eyes roam her face, gauging her reaction. “I only saw my approach with Luke, and then your fight.” 

A small mercy. 

“But I remember it,” he adds.

Rey’s face heats. “I’ll just bet you do,” she mutters. 

“It was memorable.” A hint of a smirk dances around the corners of his mouth. She tries to glare at him, but she can’t find her anger any longer. It has trickled out of her like water from a leaking pot. 

She picks a path at random. Takes ten steps and stops. 

“So did what I did in there change anything, or did it always happen like that?” It’s hard to put into words. It makes her mind fold and bend like a paper children’s toy. 

Ben’s still here with her. Still dead. She wouldn’t have expected him to credit her warning, given how they left things, but surely something should be different. 

Ben shrugs. “How would I know the difference?”

She lets out her breath through her teeth. “You never told me,” she points out.

He shrugs more dramatically, again with that little smile. “You were never very interested in listening to what I had to say,” he says. 

* * *

Another boulder. Another portal. Another chance to change Ben’s life. 

“There,” Ben points. “A planet in Wild Space. That starship, the _Grimtaash_. That’s mine. I left Luke’s temple on that ship.” 

Rey peers into the new time and place. It’s a junkyard. A barely-civilized wasteland. She doesn’t have room to judge; she’s from Jakku.

“What were you doing there?’

“Looking for the Knights of Ren,” Ben says, his voice subdued. 

Rey suppresses a surge of revulsion. The Knights were such a banal, pedestrian evil. Just thugs like the ones who preyed on the weak and vulnerable in Jakku. Evil growing out of greed, not fear. So different from the root of Kylo Ren’s atrocities. She’s never been able to understand his association with them. 

“Right,” Rey says. “We’ll have to talk about that.” 

Ben says nothing, but his face speaks eloquently of regret. 

“You don’t think it will work,” she says. 

“I don’t know,” he temporizes. “It didn’t happen this way. Snoke offered me power. Belonging. Acceptance. So did they.” 

Rey squares her shoulders. “Then I will too.”

She steps through the portal into the cramped galley of the ship. It smells a bit like unwashed socks and engine grease, a familiar odor from her time on the _Millenium Falcon_. She can sense only Ben within the vessel. 

Ben’s double-take when he pokes his head out of the cockpit is gratifying. But he quickly smothers his reaction under a mask of dispassion. 

“I wondered if I would see you again,” he says, padding out of the cockpit and facing her from the arch in the bulkhead. The way he leans against the doorway would be comical for the attitude he’s trying to express, if the circumstances weren’t so serious. 

“I promised you would,” she reminds him. 

“Still,” he adds, nodding in acknowledgment. They assess each other. He’s still wearing Jedi robes, but his hair has grown out. He’s bigger. Stronger. A man now, come into his full power.

His face is the most changed: anxiety makes his features still where they’d been mobile and expressive. She knows that he is absorbing how she is untouched by the several years since they last met, by his perspective.

“Did you come to talk to me about Luke again, or to gloat?” he asks abruptly. 

She takes a step closer to him. Then another. He holds up a palm to halt her advance, and she stills.

“Neither,” she says. 

He searches his face, and she returns the favor in kind. There’s more of Kylo Ren to him now. The wounded eyes. The sullen mouth. The way his face freezes when a thought catches him, and he’s not certain if it is his own. 

“Why are you here?” he asks. He’s seen too many impossible things, she thinks, to ask ‘how.’ It is the Force connecting them, as always. Instead, he wants to know her motivations. Whether she’s a threat, or a potential ally, or...

“To help you,” she says, although her throat feels dry, and her voice squeaks a bit from the tension. It’s like petting a wild Loth-wolf. She’s not certain whether he’ll lick her face or bite off her hand. 

He makes a sound of a desultory amusement. “Oh? I could have used your help with Luke. I think I’m doing alright now.” 

She shakes her head slowly. “You have no idea.”

“Hmmm.” His hand slowly moves away from the lightsaber at his waist. He straightens, looks into the galley. “I have caf. Can’t offer you anything stronger this time.” 

“Thank you,” she says with real gratitude. 

He puts his back to her as he brushes past, and she holds her breath. His shoulders are stiff and awkward as he goes through the motions of brewing in the galley’s little drip pot. She senses that he’s waiting for her to make a move or otherwise show her hand. When he presses a tin mug into her hands, she smiles at him over the rim. He waits for a few beats before she sees the smallest quirk in his lips in response. But some of the tension goes out of his hands.

There’s only one chair by the little pull-down table. The other side is adjacent to the single berth, which Ben pulls down from the wall and secures to the floor. He perches on the corner of it and offers her the other seat. 

Then he waits for her to talk.

Rey thinks of true things that she can tell him. True things that might make him trust her, listen to her, change his mind. Change his fate.

So she tells him that Luke is alive.

He already believes that to be true.

She tells him that Snoke only wants him for his power.

He finds that flattering, if anything. 

She tells him that the Emperor is waiting to strike again.

He wishes Luke the joy of that.

She tells him that he can make his own destiny. 

And then she has his attention.

So she begins to talk about places she’s dreamed of visiting. She can’t risk telling him about the planets the Resistance has used as shelter, not when this can still go wrong, but she describes Takodana. The green of the place. The strangeness of the people. Everything she still wants to see. With him. 

His face softens, bit by bit, as they talk. He hasn’t been very many places since his mother sent him away. A part of him still remembers his dream of being a pilot. His dreams have not yet coalesced around a place in the Dark Side: he only knows how he wants to _feel._ Strong. Free. 

“You could contact your father,” Rey suggests, and some of his prior tension returns. “Ben,” she says when he doesn’t respond. “You haven’t done anything wrong. He’d believe you. I believe you. You still have everything ahead-”

“I’m done with that. Done with what my family wants,” he cuts her off. 

He stands and takes their cups to place them in the sonic cleaner. 

She looks up at him as he brushes past her. And that’s all it takes--the cups fall to the floor, forgotten. 

He doesn’t think of his family now. He has different dreams. Different wants. She’s only one of them. 

He puts one hand under her chin, and the other around the back of her neck. She wonders whether he’s been kissing someone else, or whether he’s only been thinking about it over the past years of his life, because his mouth is bruising and intentional against hers this time. He doesn’t kiss her like he’s desperate. He kisses her like he’s been planning it for years, and maybe he has. His fingers press along her jawline, and she moans into his mouth. 

They stumble back to the berth, and manage to land so that she’s not crushed under him, even if he keeps nearly going over the edge, and she has to grab at his shirtfront to pull him back. 

His mouth is hard against hers, but softer on her chin and throat. He puts the back of his hand over her heart. 

“I dreamed of you again,” he says against her skin. “In a desert. It was night. I woke up crying.”

She nods into his soft, sweaty curls. “They’re all sad dreams, for a while,” she whispers. 

Ben runs the side of his hand between her breasts and looks up at her for permission. When she nods, he slides his hand down her stomach, fine hairs on the backs of his fingers scratching the soft skin of her belly. 

He’s not so certain as he was before once he gets his hand between her legs. But Rey raised herself, and she doesn’t have manners, and so she rocks against his fingers until she’s flushed and crying his name, and he looks at her like she’s the answer to every problem in the world. 

“Can you wait a few years? For me?” she asks him, fatigue fuzzing the boundaries between their minds. 

He’s not inclined to wait. He wants what he wants.

“You can pick out the perfect place,” she tells him. “You have a ship and a lightsaber. You don’t need anything else. I’ll be there, I promise.” 

“I’ll find you,” he vows. 

She falls asleep with his fingers curled inside her. He whispers the names of green planets to her. 

When she wakes up, many hours later, he’s gone.

She straightens her clothes, looks out the cockpit window. He didn’t leave a note.

The junkyard is deserted. The first movement Rey sights is the spiked tip of a pike as its wielder summits the bowl of the landing bay. The Knights of Ren are marching to the _Graendahl,_ and the former Ben Solo walks among them. He has somehow gained a crude black helmet, which he dons as he approaches his ship. 

Rey barely makes it back through the portal before the cargo door opens. He is calling her name. 

* * *

She’s not surprised, this time, to see Ben waiting for her on the other side of the portal. Nothing has changed. Ben didn’t change. She wasn’t enough. 

She doesn’t want to know what he saw. What he thinks. She shakes her head and walks on.

“Take me to the night we met,” she tells him tersely. She has some things to discuss with Kylo Ren.

* * *

She expects Ben to take her to Starkiller. Instead, he takes her to the _Finalizer_. 

“You’re sure?” she asks him. He nods. 

“You should see this,” he tells her. Together, they open a portal, and it displays Kylo’s spartan, dark quarters. His clothing is puddled on the floor, leaking snow-melt and blood. His boots are against the wall on their sides, as though someone tossed them there in a rage. 

At first, she thinks it’s a horribly inappropriate joke. Kylo is in the ‘fresher, mid-cleansing cycle. He’s had some bacta sprayed across his body and applied in patches where Rey’s lightsaber cut deep, but not enough. His wounds are still red and angry, and part of her shudders sympathetically to imagine how the steaming hot water he’s propped under must feel. 

She didn’t really want to see him naked, at this point, but here they are. 

He doesn’t recognize that Rey has entered his chambers, so she has to awkwardly clear her throat. 

His eyes snap open, and she finds herself frozen in place, heels lifting off the ground. His expression is briefly frantic before he recognizes her. 

She’s stronger than him now, and he’s had a long night. She breaks his hold, and her feet touch the floor. His expression shutters, but he makes no move to cover himself or even to leave the vulnerable space of the ‘fresher. 

“So,” she says, and then decides that she will let him explain himself this time. 

Why he took her, even knowing who she would be to him. Why he rejected her open hand and his father’s. 

“I wasn’t sure it was you,” he says, as though they’re in the middle of a ten-year long conversation, not a new one. “You looked different. From before, or when I used to dream of you.”

“And when you knew?”

He shrugs. “I was surprised.” He shuts the water off and doesn’t bother with the dry cycle. Water drips down his powerful body and pools in pink-tinged puddles at his feet. He lifts his hands as though to put them on his hips, only to realize that there’s no space for his elbows. Then he drops them in a movement that echoes his old schoolboy awkwardness. It softens Rey’s heart only fractionally. “A little desert scavenger, who didn’t even know she carried any power.” 

Rey focuses her eyes on his wet hair, clinging to his skull. She won’t cry if she thinks about the lines of his ears. 

“I wasn’t sure I would see you again,” Kylo continues. “Now that I’ve met the other you. Or is it the real you?” 

“We’re both real,” Rey grits at him. 

“I suppose that remains to be seen,” Kylo says, his voice smoothing out. 

Rey takes a step back. He’s gaining comfort with her presence here. He might be naked and wounded, but he’s in his space of power, and he’s only grown more dangerous over the years. 

“Why did you come this time?” he asks, stepping out and reaching for a small hand-towel next to his attached sink. He briskly begins to rub himself dry, heedless of his injuries. His voice is absently curious. “You must have known what happens. You always knew, didn’t you? You knew what happens, and you came to me anyway.” The muscles in his back bunch as he bends to run the towel over powerful thighs, crooked bare feet. 

Rey swallows and looks away. She can’t watch him do human things while they talk about this. She won’t answer his statements. It’s not about her. This is his problem. 

“You didn’t have to do it,” she tells Kylo. “You didn’t have to join the Knights of Ren. You didn’t have to kill Han Solo. You knew you would see me again. You just had to wait. I would have helped you leave Snoke. Why didn’t you wait?”

Kylo seems to ignore her for a moment. He’s heedless of his nudity, but he walks back into his chambers to retrieve a pair of trousers. The wound on his side is not entirely closed, and she can see beads of blood blooming again along the edges of his bowcaster wound where the flesh was not cauterized. 

“So that’s it,” he muses to himself. “You thought you could change me. Offer yourself up as a reward and bring me back to the Light.” 

Rey can’t argue with that, but she doesn’t understand the surge of shame that curls through her cheeks and throat. There’s something wrong with what he said, but she doesn’t have the words to express it. 

When she doesn’t respond, Kylo huffs out a nearly-silent laugh. He stabs his legs into his trousers, one by one, keeps eye contact while he does it. His mask rests on the dresser to his side; his tunic is discarded across the room. 

“I think you’re the one who will change,” he says. “If what I did were really that important to you, you wouldn’t be here, would you?” 

“Ben,” she starts, then falls silent. 

She approaches him slowly, nearly on tiptoes. He glances up from doing the catches on his trousers. 

“I’m tired, and I need to fly to the _Supremacy_ ,” he tells her, scolding her as though she’s a child begging for a treat. He knows the effect he has on her. He’s been in her mind now, not just her arms. 

She bites down on her lips to prevent angry words from escaping. He killed his father this night. 

She puts her fingertips over his bowcaster wound. Lets just a little healing run into it. Just enough to stanch the wound. He shivers. 

“Ben, I already know you’ll turn. I’m trying to save your life after you do it,” she tells him, trying to put her entire heart into her voice. 

His eyes are hooded when he looks down at her hand on his side.

“Then tell me where to find Luke Skywalker,” Kylo says, voice silky. “I don’t mean to die. I mean to have all of it. Including you.” 

* * *

Kylo made no effort to prevent her from leaving. Why would he? He has every expectation he’ll see her again soon. 

She can’t be angry at him. She knew him. He’s the exact person she remembers. She’ll see him again in a few hours, from her cell on Ahch-To. He’ll be offering her his hand by the end of the week, and she’ll want to take it. 

She can still be angry at Ben, though. 

“That’s what you wanted me to see?” she demands of Ben. “I know you turned, I know you came back for me. You did. You _will._ What do I need to say? How can I tell you before it’s too late? When we still have time to stop this?”

He only looks into her eyes as though memorizing their color. He never expected this to work. 

“Ben?” she pleads with him. He glances away. Into the formless void of the sea. “Talk to me,” she says. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what to say.” 

He turns away, and he’s not solid enough for her to pull him back to her. 

Ben’s shoulders hunch, and he spins back. His hands grip her shoulders, and she can feel _that_ at least. 

“I died for you, isn’t that enough?!” Ben begs her.

“I want you to _live_ for me,” Rey yells back at him. There’s nothing that can be done, not anymore, but she wants someone to blame for this, and Ben is the only one here. His face is sad, so sad, why is he always so sad when he died with a smile on his face? 

“Why do you expect that from me, when you wouldn’t do it? When that’s why we’re here in the first place? I died! It’s over! You know exactly who I am, every choice I ever made, and why I died. It’s you who just can’t accept it, not me. You’re the one who can’t change, even though you have to.” He’s shaking her now. Her head rolls back with the motion of his hands until he realizes and jerks his hands away.

“You think I won’t?” Rey grits out. “You think I’d do less for you?”

His face gives her the answer.

She looks down the rows of boulders. 

“Where did you find the Wayfinder, Ben?” she asks. 

“Mustafar,” he responds, puzzled. He doesn’t understand. He thinks it’s over. 

She stalks off in the general direction he indicates. He follows a few seconds behind.

“What do you have planned?” he asks softly. “Rey it’s-it’s too late by then. The Emperor’s power, the First Order--”

“It’s not too late for me,” Rey says. He stops again, and she waits because she doesn’t know where to go without him. 

“For you to-”

“Be the one to turn.”

He won’t help her then, of course, even when she screams at him. Even when she pleads with him.

He’s the one who said it. The one who foresaw it. Even if he no longer wants it. 

So she goes by herself, opening portals, peering through them. Fifty different worlds, a hundred. She sees Kylo touch her hand across a galaxy. She sees Hosnian Prime destroyed by Starkiller base, Kylo’s silhouette blocking out the light. She sees Han carry his son on his shoulders. She sees Ben build his first lightsaber. She sees Kylo build his second one. Minutes and days and scenes across his life. They’re in no order that she can discern, but she has forever, doesn’t she? She’ll watch his entire life if she has to. It wasn’t that long.

“Here,” Ben says, his voice resigned. She thought he was some distance away, but his voice carries across the water, and distance does not mean very much in the World Between Worlds. When she focuses, she can see him. The only figure between the sea and the sky. 

She crosses the boulders to him and stands before a firelit scene. 

“I don’t want this,” he says. 

“We’ll see,” Rey tells him. “Maybe you don’t. Maybe you didn’t. I never found out, did I?” 

* * *

Darth Vader’s castle still looms over the lava fields of Mustafar, thirty years after his death. Its black basalt spires are undiminished as they jut into the roiling grey skies. 

The gate and the front door are open and unattended. The fields outside are full of bodies, blood feeding the skeletal trees that reach out of the ashy soil like grasping fingers. 

The only living being Rey can sense is inside.

There are no lights in the castle; the caustic atmosphere and the progress of time have rusted away all the circuitry. But the vents down to the lava flows below bathe the unrelieved black of the decor in red light.

Kylo is in the great hall. It is grand and imposing, with long banquet tables carved out of the same rock as the walls and running the length of a landing strip in two long lines. Rey can’t imagine that anyone has ever hosted enough people to throw a banquet here, but she supposes that the point of the space is not the guests. It’s the throne against the other wall, reaching up two stories or more in pillars of stone. 

Kylo is sitting on it, of course, one foot resting on the opposite knee, as he studies the wayfinder in his broad palm. He sees her come in; she supposes that he can’t feel her as well as he did when they were enemies. 

He has learned to bury his reactions to her. His face hardly twitches as she approaches him to stand at the foot of the dais upon which the throne is carved. Instead he studies her, noting the small changes since they last saw each other. 

Neither of them speak. Rey slowly unclips her saberstaff and puts it down on the floor. Then she kicks it away. Kylo’s chin tilts to see it roll away and come to rest under one of the tables. A wrinkle forms between his eyebrows, and is smoothed away when he speaks.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says, struggling for indifference. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.” 

“I keep my promises,” she says. 

He cocks his head, waiting. She takes a step toward him. Then another. 

“It must not be long now,” he says, eyes touching her hair, the band on her arm. 

“Almost no time at all,” she agrees. 

He doesn’t move as she walks up the steps and comes to stand in front of him. His face cracks into only mild puzzlement as she stands toe to toe with him. Kylo’s only move is to shift the wayfinder out of her reach, onto a side table. 

She catches his hand on the way back. He stares at it for a moment; his large, gloved fist caught by her smaller, sun-chapped one. She places her other hand against his palm and curls the tips of her fingers against the leather. His comprehension dawns on his face like the sun breaking through the clouds.

Kylo’s thick, black eyelashes lift as he looks from their conjoined hands to her face. 

“Why now?” he asks, voice hoarse. 

“Does it matter?” she responds. After a moment, he must decide in the negative, because his fist curls around her hand, and he pulls her forward steadily, until she has no choice but to tumble into his lap. She doesn’t fight it. The throne was built for a man in full, mechanical armor, and there’s plenty of room for her to curl up there, her back to Kylo’ padded chest and her knees tucked up under her chin. 

“You mean I win,” he clarifies. “You’ll stay. With me.” 

“Yes,” she agrees. 

“You’ll help me defeat the Emperor. We’ll take his power for ourselves,” he says, increasingly excited. 

“Yes.” 

He cups her face with one hand, turns it to look up at him. The angle is painful for her neck, but she meets his eyes without blinking. He is searching her face for trickery, but he finds none. 

He weaves a hand into her hair, pulling her back over his arm until her body is drawn like a bow. 

He waits for her to object, and when she does not, he kisses her. He doesn’t close his eyes to do it, and neither does she, but his lips on hers convey every bit of passion in his restless heart. He’s known no peace since they parted on Crait--perhaps none since he was born--but his relief that Rey has finally come to him, finally acknowledged that he’s been right all along--it steals her breath. His relief is as jolting as blaster fire. He gasps into her mouth, and then his tongue his sliding along hers, and his big hands are roaming along her body. It’s nothing like a caress, at first. He grasps her shoulders and elbows just to reassure himself that she’s solidly there in his arms, allowing him to embrace her with no indication that he will turn his face back to the Light. 

But when she rubs herself back against him, baring her throat to his searching mouth, he gives into it. He kisses her like he’d rather bite her. He pinches the tips of her breasts through her clothing. He lifts a knee between her thighs, forcing her legs apart. And Rey, for her part-she gives in too. There’s no point in holding back now, is there? If she’s going to be damned alongside him, she might as well enjoy the spoils of surrender. Jedi fell to the Dark Side for a reason. Because of what it could offer them. Power. Life. Love. She’ll gain all three, for whatever time she can keep him alive. 

No other Jedi ever came to help Ben Solo. So maybe Kylo Ren deserves this. Deserves her. Maybe this is enough. Maybe this is the balance the Force demanded: Kylo, stripping off his gloves with his teeth, racing to bare enough skin to touch her. Rey, rocking back against him to hear him hiss as she brushes against his cock where it is constrained in his trousers. He jerks at her belt until the buckle parts under his hands. 

Then he’s hurrying to shove her leggings down over her hips. His hands immediately follow, frustrated only because the angle doesn’t really allow him to touch her. 

He doesn’t say anything, this time. No promises. No sweet words. There’s only the rasp of his breathing and the rustle of their clothing as he lifts her and spins her to face him. His nose and chin press against her throat as he arranges her bare thighs over his clothed ones. 

She thinks she might be crying, because it’s harder to see. Kylo is pulling at his own clothing now, trying to undo the buttons on his trousers and tunic. She wraps an arm over his shoulder for balance, and also because it puts her fingertips in his lovely, dark hair. It’s always been her favorite feature on him, even if it smells like ash today. 

Kylo gets himself out of his underclothes and wraps a hand around his cock. They both look down. He’s panting as though they’ve already consummated this relationship, like they’ve fought with lightsabers, like they’ve run all day. 

Kylo catches her lower lip with his tongue and teeth, a quick swipe of wetness, a small assertion of dominance. He looks closer at her face. Licks a tear that has reached her cheek. 

“Yes?” he asks, and he will wait, Rey knows. He’s seated on the throne of the last living lord of the Sith, and he has killed people on this day, and will kill more on the next-but he loves her with all his broken, fractured heart, and he will wait for this. 

“Yes,” she whispers, and she is the one who moves closer, closes the distance between him, and fits her body against his. 

He pulls her down onto him. He is fiercely joyous about it. He was right, he thinks. All the anger and loss he has suffered--it led him to this moment. He is the master of his grandfather’s castle, the Force obeys his every wish, and Rey is vibrating in his arms. The Force has always sung every time they touched, and it’s no different this time. The Force doesn’t care whether they are fucking or fighting; it wants them joined. There’s so much power in them, and the Force doesn’t care whether it is turned to the aims of the Jedi or the Sith. She slides a few inches, and then a few more, and then her thighs clench over his as it is done. 

Kylo looks down, stunned, at where their bodies are pressed together. His palm covers her stomach as he calculates how deeply he is fit inside her. Then he looks up at her and smiles. She never saw Kylo Ren smile, Rey thinks. It’s not the same. It uses fewer muscles, or perhaps it doesn’t reach all the way into his eyes. That, more than anything, makes her heart sink. That she won’t see Ben Solo’s smile. It feels like a loss for the man in her arms, more than anything, but what is that loss, weighed against his life? Not too much, she has bargained.

Kylo doesn’t like the expression that chain of thought has left on her face, so he leans forward, curling his body so that he can press his lips against her collarbone. His tongue traces freckles burned by the sun into her skin, and he begrudges it for touching her before he did. 

The hand he weaves between their bodies, haltingly searching for some way to bring her pleasure in this, seems like a distraction. The Force wants this. It wants the two of them pressed together, feeding each other power. It doesn’t matter if he touches her there, where she is wet and split around him; she was always going to come when he did. Their minds are too close. 

And he’s close too. It’s been only a few moments of his unsteady hips moving beneath hers, but he’s new to this. He hasn’t studied these forms. He doesn’t know how to last, when she’s tight around him and weightless in his arms. So he settles for making her feel it in the time they have left. His hand holds her hip hard enough to bruise, yanking her down on him, using the little leverage he has to press deeper inside her. She can feel it, when he comes--not just the physical sensation, but the echo through their bond. Muted, where it is split, but strong enough that she cries out as well. Probably the wrong name, from his perspective, but she can’t tell if he even notices. 

Kylo tips his head back against the basalt throne to recover herself, and she memorizes this look on his face. This is as good as it gets. As happy as he’ll ever be, even if they can succeed in defeating the Emperor with the Dark, instead of the Light. Perhaps she will adjust in time. But he will never believe in his father’s forgiveness. His mother’s love. His own intrinsic worth. He will never again be as happy as he was today, that Rey came to him of her own volition, and gave herself to him on the throne of his ancestor. This is all he ever will have. 

She looks at him so long that she does not even recognize when he begins looking back. His puzzled frown. 

“Why do you pity me now, Rey?” he asks, his voice soft and small.

She lifts a hand to cup his face, to smooth the worry from his forehead. She’s not done looking at him yet. 

He traps it there with one of his own. 

“Why,” he breathes the question again. “I have everything I wanted. Don’t you?”

She can’t stop the small cry that hurtles through her chest. Tears have been burning in her eyes and nose this entire time, and she knows that they will come loose if she relaxes her control even an instant. 

“Oh Ben,” she says, trying to be matter-of-fact about it. “We lost so much. You don’t even know. We lost so much.” 

His eyes are always beautiful. Desperately sad, except for that one moment when he was dying. That won’t change now. His thumb grazes the back of her palm as his eyes hang on her face. His wide, dark pupils narrow as he comes to some decision. 

She squeaks when he lifts her off him. He uses one hand to roughly jerk her pants up to cover her. She stumbles as she slides back off the throne, feet scrabbling for purchase on the polished black stone.

“What-” she expected him to carry her back up to his bedchamber, try it again. Instead, he’s efficiently settling his own clothing into place, raking a hand through his hair.

“Go back,” he tells her stiffly. “Go back now, before I change my mind.” 

He turns, looking up at the throne as though to anchor himself. 

“Ben?” she asks tentatively. 

He barks a laugh. “No. That’s still what you want, isn’t it?” 

She shakes her head. She’s given up. There isn’t a way. 

“I won’t have you here, looking at me like that,” he says. “It’s not what either of us want.” 

“This is the best I could do,” she says. “I tried. I tried my best.” 

She should never have expected mercy from Kylo Ren. He calls her saberstaff to hand while ducking his shoulder to hit her in the midsection. She is too surprised to fight back before he has her tossed neatly over his shoulder. It’s so strangely uncharacteristic of him that Rey lets her feet dangle in shock as he bounds down the stairs and through the great hall. When she doesn’t resist, he shifts her off of his shoulder and into his arms. His heart is pounding so hard she can feel it against her cheek, even through his padded tunic. She feels him search for the portal, and finally set her in front of it when he locates it at the gates to the castle. 

“Whoever you’re looking for isn’t here,” he tells her bitingly, when he drops her onto the ground. “Perhaps he never was. Or maybe you’re right, and I’m not there yet. But don’t come back here. I don’t want to see you again. The Rey I’m in love with would never give up.” 

And then he pushes her through the portal. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You doing okay, guys? Bear with me here. I promise they're going home together in the next chapter.


	6. Do You See No Ghosts In Me At All?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not set out to make anyone cry. But you should know that I cried.

She’s afraid Ben will be disappointed in her. If he’s still there. Anakin said there were a million ways she could destroy their world, and recklessly seducing his grandson in Anakin’s own castle was probably one of the top ones on his list. 

She shouldn’t have worried. 

Ben’s waiting for her, and he’s smiling. Grinning, in fact, in a way that makes her squirm. 

“Stop it,” she says, and she feels her cheeks heating. 

He doesn’t say anything, but all he does to contain his amusement is close his lips. Force, of course he knows what happened. He  _ lived _ it. At least he now seems to remember it fondly. 

She pretends to be surveying their surroundings, but in reality she is straightening her clothes and hair. She is sticky between her legs, and she wishes Ben would stop looking at her. 

“So that didn’t work either,” she mutters, trying to change the subject of both their thoughts. 

“I’m not sure about that,” he rumbles. “Look.”

When Rey takes stock of their position, she realizes the difference. Where once the boulders were scattered nearly at random across the endless sea, they have moved. There is now a single path. One side goes forward to a terminus, a short distance away, and the other goes back to their entrance, now barely visible through the mists rising off the sea. 

“Oh, but — ” she says, staring at that last boulder, surrounded by the green-grey water. Ben moves to stand next to her, his shoulder blurring at the edges as it brushes hers. “Ben, that’s the end. That’s the last one. There wasn’t an end before.”

Ben shrugs. “There was always going to be an end. There was one.” 

“You don’t...you don’t think there’s still anything I can do, do you? I can’t think of anything else I could have done then. It took everything we had, plus all the Jedi, just to stop him. How could it end differently?”

Ben smiles over at her. His fingers brush hers reassuringly. “We don’t have to go. We could just go back out the way we came.”

Rey looks back at the entrance. It is far away, shimmering golden. Lothal is still there. Ben is still with her, at least a little. She could go back, take what’s he has offered. Half a life, half a soul.

“No,” she sighs. “We’ve come this far. I’ll see it through. If you were strong enough to live it, I’m strong enough to witness it. I’ll go.” 

His fingers solidify enough to twine around hers. They link together, and he brushes a thumb tenderly over the knuckles of her hand. 

It’s a short walk, and when Rey looks back, all the stones are the same. It all leads up to this now. Exegol.

She and Ben lift their hands together to open the portal. Their view blurs, settles, and then focuses on the heart of the Citadel. The battle is already over; there is ash in the air, and Rey’s figure sprawls white and still on the edge of the great fissure.

Rey gasps to see herself from a separate vantage point. How disorienting must it have been for Ben, to see himself again and again, from infancy to manhood? Rey has never yet seen herself in any of her stolen moments of Ben’s life. Even now, how little time she’s spent in it. A handful of days against three decades, too short on either end. 

She looks very small in the center of the great arena. She can’t remember it, of course. There’s nothing at all between the Emperor’s fall and waking up in Ben’s arms. Not even blackness, not even the sense that she slept or waited or…

There’s nothing. She was dead. 

“I was really gone,” Rey says, looking at her own body. 

Ben’s mouth sets in a familiar, thoughtful line. “I didn’t accept that.”

That, at least, gives her the faintest surge of hope. She smiles at Ben, trying to convey that emotion to him. To share it. 

“Then neither will I.”

* * *

It feels like no time has passed at all. It’s been a few weeks, perhaps a month, since Rey stood here, looking up at the debris-choked sky, choking on the dust of the dead planet, but her heart begins to pound as though her battle were only seconds past. 

Rey ignores her prone form and shuffles to the edge of the pit. She goes to her knees and peers over the edge. It’s dark. Nighttime. There is no source of light but the stars and explosions overhead. But deep in the fissure, her eyes can discern movement. One person is still alive in the Citadel right now, and he is climbing. Ben’s coming for her. 

She scuttles back on her hands and knees, afraid to distract him while he’s raising himself on shattered limbs and bleeding hands. She has until he reaches the tops to divine a different solution. 

Her eyes return to her own body. Is that it? Is that the solution Anakin spoke of? She’s strong in the Force, this future version of herself. Can she lend Ben enough energy to save both their lives?

She crouches next to the body, and reaches out to it with her feelings. There’s nothing there. Rey can’t feel the body any more than she can feel the stone of the floor or the stars up above. She tries to direct the Force, pull it from elsewhere in the world, in the universe—and it does not respond. She has nothing more than what she brought with her, and that little bit of energy is like sparks swallowed by a blizzard. This world is dead, and so is she. The only thing Rey can feel is Ben, and that connection is faint and tenuous, split from her awareness of his ghost, watching from the portal. 

“They say you were powerful, but nobody says you were brilliant,” Rey mutters to an unseen Anakin. “What is it? What did you want me to see?”

Rey’s head snaps up at that thought, and she looks around the room. The room should be full of Jedi ghosts. It’s been only seconds since she defeated Palpatine. 

“Hello?” she calls. There’s no response. 

“I know you’re here. I know you can still hear me. I don’t believe you’d leave while I’m dead, and Ben’s still climbing out of the pit.” 

The silence of the arena is echoing, but Rey trudges on.

“I know you think the role of the Jedi is to fight the Sith, and the Sith are gone. Well, the Force doesn’t care about the Jedi or the Sith, and all of you are still with the Force.” 

It might be Rey’s imagination, but there’s a rustling sound, like wind or fabric. Someone is listening to her. 

“You were all people. I didn’t know most of you. I wish I had—but you know Ben. He’s something to all of you, not just to me.”

Rey sees the faintest outline of a pair of Jedi appear, standing by her prone form. She can’t quite make out the silhouettes. She hazards a guess as to who is most likely to render aid. 

“Ahsoka! You already helped us. Please, just one more time. I’m not a Jedi either. There’s a place in the Force for people like us.”

But the first pair of Force ghosts solidify into the glowing, blue forms of Ben’s mother and uncle. The Togruta comes next, flanked by a dark-skinned Jedi Knight with thick, slashing eyebrows. 

Rey addresses her next plea to the Skywalkers. Her throat is tight and her voice is hoarse, but at least she has their attention. They are listening to her. 

“Leia! He’s your  _ son _ . He was your baby, and you loved him. Luke...he believed in you. He  _ trusted _ you. He thought you would protect him from the Emperor. You said you’d help him, and you’d see him again. Can’t you help him now?”

Their faces are inscrutable. Thoughtful and remote. But more are coming. More Jedi in long, pale robes, fuzzing into visibility in a half-circle around Rey and her fallen form.

Rey barely dares to look over her shoulder at the pit. She can’t see Ben yet, but she can feel him rising, handhold by painful handhold. 

Rey recognizes Ben’s grandfather at last. He is among the growing crowd of Jedi, frowning at her. He wears the Jedi robes he abjured during his life, mingling seamlessly with his contemporaries. It makes her abruptly furious that he left his entire, bitter legacy for his grandson to play out again. He is accepted, after he destroyed the entire Order? Where is Ben’s place in all this?

“Anakin,” Rey says, narrowing her eyes at him. “They said you’d bring balance to the Force. You left that to us. Me and Ben. What balance is there if he dies, and I live? He’s the other half of my soul! There is no balance without him.” She hiccups, and his eyes don’t even flicker. “Without him, there’s barely even  _ me _ .” 

There are more Jedi filtering in the back, surrounding her. Both of her. They watch her with faces full of distant compassion. Compassion that is still and silent, frozen in place like frost on durasteel. 

Rey tries again, whispering. “You loved someone for your whole life. When you were a Jedi. When you were a Sith. If you don’t do it because you’re a Jedi, do it for that reason.” 

That last finally generates a tiny hint of a response. Anakin turns his head, ever so slightly, and looks down at the smallest of the assembled Jedi. A wizened little creature, only waist-high to Luke Skywalker.

They exchange some silent interaction.

“You don’t want to be a Jedi?” Anakin asks, the first of them to speak. Rey shakes her head. The things she has wanted: a family, peace, justice—she thought, once, that the Jedi could give them to her. But that was merely praxis. What were the Jedi, if they eschewed love, made war, ignored injustice? Ben was always right. It’s time to let old things die. 

“Everything I was supposed to accomplish—not just me, the Jedi—it’s done. The Force is done with me. I’m done with it,” she says, trying to meet the eyes of as many of the glowing, blue beings as she can. “There are no more Sith. No more Jedi. It’s done. There is balance.”

She takes a deep breath. 

“I just want Ben Solo,” she says. 

She sees one grimy, bloody hand reach over the ledge of the abyss. Ben has reached the top. The muscles of his arms bunch under his jumper as he pulls his body over the edge. His eyes are wide and frightened, fixed only on Rey’s still and silent form, cooling on the stone ground. 

He can’t see the Jedi, but the Jedi can see him. They turn away. One by one, they turn and walk back into the darkness. Even Leia and Luke close their eyes and step away without speaking to their son and pupil. 

Ben extends an arm to Rey’s body, preparing to crawl. 

The small, shriveled creature is the last of them. The rest have departed; they are quit of Rey now that she is of no further use to their cause. The last of them studies Rey, his hands restless on his little wooden walking stick. He sighs, and raps it on the ground. He turns his own face up to the sky. 

“Take him then,” he pronounces. 

* * *

  
The little Jedi Master’s words seem to linger in the air as he vanishes. His words were like a signal to the arena as well; Rey hears the first stone fall, somewhere in the distance. It will end in the entire Sith temple dissolving within a few minutes. She has little time left, Ben even less.

Take him? What did the wretched thing mean? Rey feels no more or less power than she came with. She can’t heal herself. She can’t stop the roof from coming down. 

But she realizes that she’s always been able to touch Ben Solo.

So she does. She grabs him by the back of his grimy black jumper, and she hauls him towards the portal, panic giving her the strength to drag one very large, muscular human man from the edge of the abyss to the portal to the World Between Worlds. 

He doesn’t make it easy for her. He fights back pretty hard, actually, but he’s unarmed, and he has several broken bones, and he had had a long, hard day even before he was drained of most of his energy by an avatar of all the Sith and then tossed into a bottomless pit. 

It’s not impossible for Rey to drag him the short distance to the portal, and then all the way in, before he gets so much as a finger onto the ankle of the other girl. The dead girl. The one who did what all the Jedi wanted, and took nothing for herself.

“This world will just have to take care of itself,” Rey mutters, and then they are both through.

Ben is still protesting violently even after Rey gets him solidly arrayed on the landing of the World Between Worlds, so she doesn’t notice at first that his ghost is gone. She doesn’t want Ben to injure himself further, or worse, fall into the deep water. 

“A broken leg, a few cracked ribs, and a minor concussion. I’ll be fine,” the other Ben remarks, and the quality of his voice is what makes Rey’s head snap up. It’s distant and faint, as though he’s shouting from the bottom of a well. She only realizes then that Ben’s glowing, blue form is on the  _ other _ side of the portal. 

He’s not dressed any differently than the man whose arms Rey is pinning down with her knees, but his expression has changed. It’s remote and peaceful now, like the expressions of the Jedi who have now departed. 

“Take good care of me, okay?” he asks, one dimple popping out to the side of his crooked mouth. 

“Ben?” Rey asks uncertainly, lifting her hand off the injured man’s chest. She ought to heal him. He’s about to pass out from trauma, and then he’ll be even harder to carry. But her attention is split to what’s happening beyond the portal: the ceiling falling, the air thickening. 

Ben’s hazy form crouches next to Rey’s still one. He covers her fingers with his own. And then Rey—the Rey that is watching this all from another world, the one who is trying to check on a different Ben’s breathing and pulse—feels it. Her bond. Her awareness of Ben is trickling out of her, the golden thread that connected them fading and growing dim.

She panics at the idea that Ben is dying, but when she looks at her wrested prize from Exegol, his pulse is steady and his injuries stable, for the moment. So she looks back between the worlds and sees the ghost of Ben shimmering into nothingness instead. 

Ben didn’t die. He never followed her into the World Between Worlds. He never watched her try to change his fate across all the moments of his life. He never happened. 

“Wait!” she cries, suddenly greedy for all of Ben, both versions of him, every single future he ever lived or died in. “Wait, I never even got to tell you I love you!” 

But Ben’s ghost is gone, and so is Rey; there’s nothing but a pile of dirty white fabric on the floor of the temple, puddled where the form that briefly embodied all the Jedi has given way. 

Then the man in her arms jolts. The very rocks they sprawl across begin to fade and fall apart as the life they were keyed to dissipates. The light is fading away as the sea recedes. 

Ben gasps as she clutches him to her chest. They are falling, boulders, sky and water all falling away. The only thing still solid in the entire netherworld is Ben, and she holds him as close as she can, even as their bond fades to nothing.

The last impression she gets through it before it vanishes completely are less words than a feeling. An understanding.

_ I know.  _

* * *

In one moment, there is nothing. Rey knows she is alive. She can feel her own heartbeat and breathing, and she knows she has her arms wrapped around Ben. That is all. She is in a formless void that has lost even the impression of falling. The world is not so much black as  _ absent _ . 

There is no dawning awareness of physical sensation—there is nothing, and then in the next moment, there is  _ everything _ . 

Rey and Ben are violently disgorged in a cascade of ice-cold seawater onto a sharp and rocky shore gleaming under blue sky and white sun. 

They both jerk and flail as they reorient themselves to a world with direction, gravity, and sensation.

Ben lets out a string of extremely fluent Huttese as he pries salt-stiff hair from his eyes and gropes for her body. 

He gets a hand on her face and flops to his good side so that he can pat her nose and cheeks with his bloody palm, reassuring himself as to her continued corporeal existence. 

“Rey,” he finally says. It’s the first thing he’s said to her since she left him on Kef Bir. 

He pauses, considering his next words. Rey covers his hands with hers and grips them until both their knuckles go white.

Ben settles on, “What the  _ kriff _ happened to us?” 

Rey can only grin at him. Her lower lip is split, and the salt is stinging her eyes. But Ben’s alive. He’s bloody, battered, dirty, and she can tell from a foot away that he hasn’t brushed his teeth any more recently than she has. But he’s  _ alive _ . 

Their bond is gone. It’s not absent, it’s not missing; it’s gone, as though it never was. Their bond vanished with the two ghosts who faded away on Exegol. The Force tells her nothing more than that there is another human being lying next to her, injured, vital, vibrating with confusion and exhilaration and worry and fear and love: a full suite of emotions discouraged by Jedi and devoutly welcomed by a very tired Rey of Jakku.

“Oh, we had some trouble with Palpatine. Don’t worry about it. He’s gone now. The Jedi send their regards.” Rey wishes the Jedi well. But she’ll never be one again, if she ever was. She’s free, and so is Ben. 

Ben looks pretty impressed by that, and Rey can’t help but laugh in response. There are no more voices in their heads, no more ghosts of the past haunting their lives. Destiny is done with them. 

Ben will have questions, of course, but they’re not the sort that bear answering while they’re both wet and filthy, stranded on some unknown shore. 

There’s one question she still sees lingering in his eyes as she pulls away to begin orienting herself to this new planet. And that’s the one she can’t wait to answer. She leans back over him, tilts her head to a mirror offset to his, and kisses him.

There’s nothing mystical about it. The Force doesn’t bring them together. She doesn’t perceive his thoughts, his past, or future. 

She feels nothing but his lips, warm and ardent on hers, his breath brushing her face, and his hands reaching up to cradle her. Nothing more than any lover gains by kissing her beloved on any world in the galaxy. It’s enough, and more than she ever hoped to have.

She hears a familiar squawk as she pulls back, and smiles to see a flock of rotund avians settle nearby, watching them curiously. They never came near this cave before, yet Rey can sense that the place has lost nearly all of its power and mystery. Ahch-To is just another green world now. People will come. People will go. The dead and their secrets will stay buried forever. 

“What do we do now?” Ben asks, taking in the steep cliffs surrounding them. 

“Well,” says Rey, “I guess I’ll need to rig up a splint for that leg of yours. Then I should probably get a signal off world to my friends. And then…”

Ben is sighting up the hill at a trio of piscine Caretakers, already descending to find out what sort of damage Rey has done to their island this time. His expression of polite befuddlement portends well for the days to come. 

“...and then?” Ben asks. Rey smiles at him, thinking of their future. 

“Well, have you ever tried blue milk?” 

**Author's Note:**

> Come cry with me on Twitter @YTCShepard.
> 
> Thankful tears to CrossingWinter for the beautiful [manip](https://twitter.com/YTCShepard/status/1209506501464920066?s=20) of Chapter 6, and tearful thanks to KyloTrashForever for the beta. Go read how they fixed it too.


End file.
